blogHi! development

blogHi! internal development log

2005/10/21

bye-bye, Chinese spammers

@ 01:25 PM (33 months, 1 day ago)
Our free blog hosting platform is about to close its doors to China. This sounds radical and stupid, since China looks like a dynamic market with a lot of growth potential. That may be very true, but fact is that since blogHi's day 1, about a year ago, we got not even one single serious blogger from over there. On the contrary, all we received from China is a strong and constant atention from spammers; a flood of spam and splogs.

It seems that there are some companies over there that make a business case from building worldwide spamming networks. What these companies do is infect any free web hosting website they can find with a matrix of so called search-engine-optimised blogs, which they interlink, and then use these web corpses to push clients websites on top of search engines. And if one thinks of the budget these companies raise from their clients; it's no wonder why the little John blogging about his life stands no chance competing with them.

This blog spamming techniques came recently under the blogosphere's attention. How effective the future anti-spam techniques will be is still left to be seen. At one level or another, right now, webmasters build firewalls and protection layers: blocking Chinese IP addresses.

We tried hard to keep up with the constant flood of spam, but now we had enough. For a while, we will block the entire Chinese IP Range; when things settle, we will start lifting the blockades one-by-one.

Please let us know your thoughts on this; we're all ears.

Comment(s) »

  1. will this affect people from China who want to view my blog? I seem to get a lot of traffic from there.

    Comment by Elmers Brother— 2005/10/28 @ 02:49 AM — (Reply)

  2. The Chinese IP ban was effective for less than a day; since the spammers learned to use computers from other parts of the world to overcome the blockade.

    What we tried to do more recently was to recognize the character set the spammers use in their posts, and if the post contains many of the Traditional Chinese group; disallow links from the posts. This strategy worked for a while, but it was again not perfect.

    Please rest assured that we do our best to avoid interfering with any regular blogHi usage. If you have any suggestions we are all ears

    Comment by blog development— 2005/10/28 @ 09:05 AM — (Reply)

  3. you should not discuss such things in public ...

    contact me via email, i know some techniques ..

    Comment by mathias— 2005/10/28 @ 09:39 AM — (Reply)

  4. It is very simple to block Chinese spammers. If you find any Chinese characters in a post, delete the post immediatly. You must check all posts daily to delette Chinese posts.

    Comment by Mark— 2005/12/12 @ 12:52 PM — (Reply)

  5. Hello Mark,

    Can you write a sample code to detect Chinese characters? So far we checked, it doesn't appear to be that simple.

    Comment by blog development— 2005/12/12 @ 12:56 PM — (Reply)

  6. THE CHANCE FOR CHINESE SPAMMERS TO READ THIS AND TELL EVERYBODY ELSE WOULD BE SWEET

    Comment by MOS— 2006/05/12 @ 04:37 PM — (Reply)

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