Comments on: comment spam

By: etbe

etbe — Sun, 06 May 2007 11:19:45 +0000

Apart from the use by visually impaired users CAPTCHAs are quite good.

One thing I have been considering is devising a set of questions that involve general knowledge and knowledge of history. Range from “which agency trained Osama bin Laden” to “name the capital city of X”. Nothing that can’t be answered with a quick google search or that couldn’t be answered from memory by someone with a good general knowledge.

Such questions about the history of the middle-east might reduce the number of comments from neo-cons too… ;)

By: Jason White

Jason White — Sun, 06 May 2007 09:29:17 +0000

The worst form of spam protection from my point of view, is the kind that
requires the user to type characters that appear in an image. (This is
obviously a problem if the user can’t see, and supplying an appropriate ALT
attribute defeats the purpose of the measure).

Blogs on sun.com ask questions in elementary arithmetic instead, which anyone
who completed primary school should be able to answer. How long will it be
before spammers write scripts that can parse and respond to those questions,
however?

In _Ending Spam_, Jonathan A. Zdziarski mounts an impressive argument that
statistical filtering will turn out to be the single most effective anti-spam
measure (though he certainly does not discount the value of other approaches).

By: Lamont Peterson

Lamont Peterson — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:04:59 +0000

Here’s how you fix it:

1. Set WordPress to require you to moderate comments. Even though it’s “too late”, better late than never.

2. Install SpamKarma2. I get ZERO comment spam that gets through on my blog and legitimate comments post immediately without requiring me to moderate. There was one comment it wasn’t sure about (turned out to be a false positive, so I allowed it), but that was months ago.

3. Sit back and let WordPress handle the rest for you. :)

By: etbe

etbe — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:21:44 +0000

Not since your “holiday” in the Ukraine Shannon… ;)

By: Shannon

Shannon — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:33:02 +0000

But Russ I thought you liked Ukrainian porn… ;P

By: Kai Hendry

Kai Hendry — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:51:21 +0000

Just using the Akismet plugin should be enough for dealing with most comment spam.

What’s with the ‘index.php’ up there?

By: Chris Samuel

Chris Samuel — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:03:00 +0000

At the very least you need to use Akismet, I’d also strongly suggest using Rich Boakes very useful Most Wanted plugin which processes the Akismet matches and lets you automatically add “Deny from” lines to your .htaccess file blocking those IP’s in future.

I find them both to be very useful, though occasionally I need to add in Deny lines by hand for harvesters that think they can grab everything from my blog at once. :-(

You may also want to look at helping out the anti-spam folks at Project Honeypot who are working on various ways to track down address harvesters and spammers.