In an attempt to stem the massive flood of spam comments that’s been coming in the last few weeks (I’ve gone from 1-2 a day to 10-15 an hour), I’ve made some configuration changes here on the site. First off, all first comments are moderated (once you have a good comment on the site, you’re except from moderation.). In addition, I’ve added a new plugin or two to block known bad apples. If you visit and find yourself 403‘d, please let me know so I can modify the settings.
Website spam, Website
Infosthetics points us to “SpamVisualization.net“, a flash-based (entirely flash based, unfortunately) that visualizing incoming Comment, TrackBack and Email Spam.
The available data visualization techniques include a Bubble Size Quantity Grid (sorted by date, size or IP number), a Word Frequency Graph (sorted by count, alphabet or length), a Top Level Pie Chart (the circles show the ratio of the toplevel domain endings in emails and link URLs), some IP Number Glyphs, and a Time Frequency Bar Graph (shows the spam income of the last seven days, with color depending on the amount per hour.).
The visualizations are fairly basic, but even that reveals interesting patterns. In the “Bubble Size Quantity Grid” (shown above), bubble size corresponds to the size of the spam message. Sort by IP Address, and you’ll see almost all of the very large messages come from the same IP address.
via Spam Visualization: Revealing Trackback & Comment Spam Patterns – information aesthetics.
Science interactive, spam
VizWorld.com 
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