If you own a website personally or for your work/business – then you will be familiar with spam comments and spam form entries. You know the ones, trying to sell you dodgy stuff, or pretending to be a beautiful woman trying to woo you into clicking their “profile” link to “see their pictures” or whatever. These type of spam comments and form entries tend to originate from bots and scripts run by spammers somewhere in the world.
They target certain types of website (ie WordPress websites or websites using certain modules) and can generally be dealt with by configuring anti-spam plugins and addons for your website such as Akismet, Wordfence and Sucuri.
However, every now and then you may receive spam that doesn’t originate from a bot – but in fact, originates from an individual (or individuals) who has taken it upon themselves to harrass you via your website with the sole intention of being annoying.
These individuals are usually loners, with little to no actual friends and often live at home with their parents well into their 50’s. They are commonly referred to as “keyboard warriors” and for some reason think that by spamming innocent businesses and spamming relentlessly, that they are being clever – but more often than not they’re actually just digging a larger hole for themselves to fall in.
What should you do if you encounter a Keyboard Warrior?
Don’t panic – these simple humans usually lack normal levels of intelligence, and leave so much evidence along the way – its easy to find them, and report their activities to the relevant authorities.
Website Form Entry Meta Info – Firstly, if your website provider has built your website using the best addons for things like contact forms – then you will have meta info stored with each contact form entry, such as how they found your website, what pages they’ve visited and more importantly – their IP address.
Server Access Logs – Additionally, their IP address can be found in access logs, which not only show where they are browsing the internet from, but also show exact times, dates and detailed info relating to their movement throughout website(s) on your server.
Language and Terminology used in the spam – Often, the way in which messages are written, words used, how punctuation is formatted and other elements of the spam comments/form entries, can reveal a lot more information than you may realise. As someone that has seen 1000’s of emails, IM’s, comments and articles written over the last 25 years online, I can analyse messages and combined with other info – deduce an awful lot of information that historically has proven to be very accurate.
Ultimately though, you dont really need to worry. People who have nothing better to do than spam innocent people are almost always harmless and weak people that won’t even look another individual in the eyes when talking to them, never mind pose an actual threat to them in the real world. They hide behind keyboards and are simply a nuisance.
Gather your evidence, speak to the authorities (Shout out to PC Pearson) and sit back and wait for the authorities to sort it for you. Things can take a short while to get resolved due to how stretched the police and other authorities are nowadays – but these things do get resoles and the people causing the annoyance are always brought to justice.
Its just a waiting game, really. 😉
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