Eternity SW

From here to eternity

Being a few words describing an ISV journey …

2007-06-30 : War On Spam - Embedded

So here is the latest on my War on Spam. I posted that I was going to embark on this war by writing my own forum software, and had some interesting stats on how that went. Following that post I made a fundamental change to the forums and wiped out 99% of all spam! It seems at this stage that the War on Spam is going really well :-)

What is slightly more disturbing is that sales of my product Fsync have fallen. Interestingly, so has the amount of traffic hitting my site! Does this mean that spammers buy my product? Or does it mean that by allowing spamming, it increases traffic (or my Google ranking) and hence sales? Am I selling products to the same people who need enlargement or cheap pills? What a quandry.

Lastly some more stats. Over the period from May 15 (when the change was made) to today there have been 639 blocked posts and 8 successful spam posts (47 days, ~14 posts per day, 1.2% successful). All those that were successful were "Hi I am new here" posts, which are not offensive, but I delete them anyway.