Yesterday, one of our customers notified us that he had observed a disquieting trend when browsing the comments of Weblogs whose authors visited Snapshirts. He saw an increase in comment spam on Weblogs that had visited Snapshirts and requested a T-shirt from us. We were naturally alarmed at the thought of our service having a detrimental effect on the Weblogs of our customers, and so we investigated this observation to determine what might be happening and what, if anything, could be done about it.
We determined that there was a flaw in our previous fulfillment methodology which may have produced some of the comment spam seen on the Weblogs of our customers. In the past, we included the Weblog URL on the T-shirt’s order page to ensure customers received the T-shirt that was directly linked to their blog. This inadvertantly made those URLs available on the Internet for persons with malicious intent. We have subsequently updated our fulfillment technology to allow instant T-shirt generation and purchase, and we no longer publish any ancillary information that could identify the Weblog’s URL on the internet.
After reaching this conclusion, we immediately removed all pages from the Internet that were generated using our older methodology.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused any of our customers. Included below are links to some common plug-ins or services you can use to combat comment spam on your site, we hope you find them useful:
WordPress – Spam Karma
Any – LinkSleeve
Any – Aksimet (requires a wordpress.com API key but NOT a wordpress blog)
Any (not free) – Blam!