Drowning In Comment Spam

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Having a website with comments means fighting a tireless battle against spammers. They want their url mentioned online because that’s how Google decides who’s important and who ranks first for any given keyword search. The spammers are persistent.

I use a double barreled approach. There’s Akismet, from the same people who write WordPress itself. It identifies characteristics common to spam, then just throws those comments away.

Until today I was also using WP-SpamFree.

A week ago what was a garden hose of spam became a fire hose! The rate of spam comments probably didn’t increase. More likely some spammer just found a new way to look human enough to penetrate my defenses.

Tonight I swapped out WP-SpamFree and replaced it with Anti-spam. I like Anti-spam because its method of trapping spammers seems foolproof.

Spammers send out thousands, maybe millions, of comments every day. This is automation at its most destructive. The spam bots look for forms and are armed with enough answers (names, email addresses, comments, etc.) to get a message in.

Anti-spam adds two questions to each comment form. Then, using javascript, it hides them so humans won’t see the questions. Bots avoid javascript. It slows them down. That lets them see the questions you don’t!

Answer the extra two questions, you’re a spam bot! Foolproof (they say).

I hope it works, because right now spam is driving me a little nuts. Akismet alone blocked 26,340 spam comments last month! I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in.

3 thoughts on “Drowning In Comment Spam”

  1. Design something idiot-proof, and the world designs a better idiot. And so it goes with spammers…this is war that never ends.

  2. Never understood spam. What do they get out of it other than being annoying? Sort of like an older brother – annoying

  3. The spam I get on my website goes directly to a spam box in my in mail. Most of the time the message has nothing to do with the content on my site. I use word press for the web site and blogger.com for my food blog with the option of reviewing all comments prior to publishing. Works for me, but I am still small in comparison to other sites.

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