Comments on: Spam, Too Much Of It

By: Ankur

Ankur — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:26:01 +0000

@Naman: No, I haven’t. It would need to work with WP though, which I’m not sure of.

By: Naman Bagga

Naman Bagga — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:15:02 +0000

Have you tried re-captcha?Its used on Social Spark!

By: Ankur

Ankur — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 08:07:52 +0000

@Ashwan: Yes, but still most spambots targetting WP blogs, I don’t thinl they use OCR to solve CAPTCHAs. Then there’s promising stuff, like giving math problems (THAT could be broken very easily), but so less a number of sites use it that most spambots aren’t built with the ability to solve them. (Those math spam protections plugins don’t work with 2.5.1 either.)

I tried Hashcash. Didn’t like it.

By: Ashwan

Ashwan — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:21:51 +0000

Akismet is your best bet for now. WP-Hashcash also works well but puts the spam in the moderation queue, so you still might want to take a look now and then.

Spam Karma 2 is one of the best plugins I know for spam-filtering on WordPress. Unfortunately it has not been updated in a while. It still works well with WP2.5.1 (I use it on a few sites I run) but there’s no telling when it might break.

From a pure usability and user point of view, I always advocate against CAPTCHAs. Why should a genuine commenter have to jump through an extra hoop? And most CAPTCHAs have been broken anyway, so a determined spambot will get through.

By: Ankur

Ankur — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 08:52:30 +0000

@Tech Nut: Still, yours is pretty low.

@Prashanth: Yeah, more people are coming. But it’s a BIG headache too. Apart from around 20 spam comments caught by Akismet daily, I also have to deal with 2-5 which slip through and are approved by Akisment, daily. :|

By: Prashanth Kanduri

Prashanth Kanduri — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:27:20 +0000

@Vivek: Make that 9 months. Woah, something can be expected now! A new domain, a hosted blog?
@Ankur: I got 3.5k spam on my old blog. And 112 is the no. of spam comments I have got in like 7 months… Although still pretty low.
@Everyone: I guess more spam comments means that better SEO has been done on the blog… as more spam bots are finding ways to come here. Take that as a good sign…

By: The Tech Nut

The Tech Nut — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:25:40 +0000

Hehe, just have 453 spam comments in my around 9 year blogging history. Plus, Akismet takes care of 99% of my problems.

By: Ankur

Ankur — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:02:16 +0000

@Naman: Whoa…that’s LOW. EXACTLY the point I was making.

@Abhishek: I know, and I’ve tried to implement both MAPTCHA and CAPTCHA. Didn’t work either time because of incompatibilities with my AJAX Comments plugin. None of them CAPTCHA plugins have XML HTTP Request handling capabilities. There’s one called AuthImage, but it doesn’t work with WP v2.5.1

@Prateek: Yes, I do use Akismet. But I *still* get spam comments.

By: Prateek Vijayavargia

Prateek Vijayavargia — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:10:23 +0000

Dont u use Akismet to filter Spam? It has done much of the trick for me. Even If I do get spam, its not very often. When I do, I have to manually delete them.

Prateek

By: Abhishek

Abhishek — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:17:59 +0000

Spam. And prevention. No better technique than math question captcha or simple class 2 questions asked before submitting a comment.

revieware.net gets a 20 spam comments a day. I don’t know why it doesn’t get filtered. I manually delete them everyday.