Identifying Spammers Using Stats

I've found that most comment spammers come and go.  Sometimes a comment spammer becomes persistent it becomes necessary to identify when to forward complaints to.  In Blogger under settings to be notified by email when a new comment has been made on your blog.  This email allows you to publish or reject the comment from the enclosed links.  The email also gives you the name of the post the comment was made on and the time it was made.  This information is useful when checking your stats.  Scroll down in your stats until you find a corresponding entry for that particular post and time.  Label the IP with something ? spammer or anything that makes sense to you. 

I recently posted about a comment spammer who left the same message on 4 posts on my cooking blog.  I labeled the IP and have been tracking visits from this person.  Since the person is in one of the same advertising networks that I participate in I would expect to occasionally see a visit from him.  This type of visit would show as a visit directly to the blog not an actual blog post.  That is not what I'm seeing in my stats.  This person has visited one specific post where he attempted comment spam on multiple occasions over the past few days.  The day after the comment spam was attempted he visited all 4 posts.  Obviously he is checking these specific posts to see if his comment was posted. 

In these types of cases tracking the visits can be beneficial if the person continues with comment spam.  If they make no further attemps at comment spam it simply shows the comment spam was intentional, done by a person not a bot.  Comment spam by a bot tends to be hit and run without checking back to see if the comment was posted.  If comment spam continues from an identified spammer then you have the choice to keep rejecting or reporting.  Rejecting is likely the best course of action.  It's quick, easy and effective while sending a clear message that their comments won't get posted.  Once they realize this they will move on. 

There are very few times that a comment spammer needs to be reported.  At one time reporting spammers was all the rage but now it seems like reporting gives them the attention they want.  If the comment spammer is a bot that hits your blog several times or a real person who persists or it turns personal then reporting might be necessary.  The IP comes in handy for this.   Run the IP through a Whois to get the contact information where to send an abuse complaint.  Send an email to the abuse address including a log of entries of their customer's visit to your blog and attempted spam comments.  Since spamming is against the TOS and AUP of most ISPs the comment spammer will be warned or lose his account.

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