Today, I had to bit the bullet and edit/publish the 414 KB on http://sexeditorials.com
I thought I would be done with spam since I included a line in the publishing script that cancels any entry that begins with "http". But now someone (or many people) are spamming with a sentence like:

"Nice site! Great work! 14a32"

Unfortunately, these are not compliments from readers. They do this in order to find pages that accept and instantly publish text entries. Since they use a program to submit to thousands of guestbooks, blogs, and story boards, they have to find the ones that do not review the text before publishing it. After a few weeks, the entries that get published instantly will be in the search engines. The spammer will then search Google for a unique part of their sentence that is so rare only their on spam results will show up -- they search Google for something like --"work! 14a32" Once they get a list of all the sites where their spam was published, the real spamming work begins. They then sign on with anonymous proxies or stolen IP addresses (so they can enter text as many times as they want without getting their IP banned). Then they spam the sites they found with literally thousands of links to junk sites that redirect to porn or online pharmacies or gambling sites. This causes their junk site to temporarily get a high rank in Google because it has so many links pointing to it. Once Google finds out it is spam, they get rid of it. But the spammer has already achieved their goal. Then they just start the process over again with different junk domains over and over again forever.

I used to have to delete the thousands of links that ended up on the sites. Then it got to the point where there was more spam than legitimate entries. I could not keep up with it, so I wrote to the author of the publishing script and asked if there was a way to ban anything that has "http" in the text. She sent me a code snippet, and it worked! The only downside would be if someone was legitimately quoting another legitimate site and used "http://" when referring to that site. I suppose then can be told in the instructions not to use "http", but they are already told to erase it after they submit.

That kept things spam-free for quite a while. Now this newest spam I mentioned above is starting to become more prevalent. I doubt there will ever be thousands of them like there were with the "http" links, but it is still a pain. It makes editing the sites much more difficult, and it a pure waste of time.