photo credit: selvaI’ve always had the worst kind of luck when it comes to spam. While many of my blogger pals get away without even implementing anti-spam techniques like CAPTCHA, I suffer from a daily truckload of spam. For example, in the short period since I shifted to WordPress in April till today, the spam filter on my blog has blocked around 110+ spam comments. People like Prashanth on the other hand, have only got 110+ or so spam comments in TWO YEARS. So I’m getting ten times more spam in two MONTHS than him. And that’s just one example. Everyone else I know who blogs – Naman, Vivek, Anuj, Abhishek – pretty much everyone seems to be immune huge amounts of spam. Why me? :p And to top it off, WordPress’ spam filtering system ALWAYS flags my comments on others blog as spam. Go figure.
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0 replies on “Spam, Too Much Of It”
I’ve received just 2 or 3 spam comments in a year and 2 months.
Therefore,daily average=3/425=0.00705882353 comments per day.
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.
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
@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.
Hehe, just have 453 spam comments in my around 9 year blogging history. Plus, Akismet takes care of 99% of my problems.
@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…
@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. 😐
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.
@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.
Have you tried re-captcha?Its used on Social Spark!