More traffic is generally good but with it comes challenges. One of the challenges is spam comments. The spam comments are getting annoying. There are dozens of them every day. It’s no big deal to just delete them all with one click and I don’t plan to turn comments off any time soon. Akismet still works well but it only identifies comments as spam. It doesn’t prevent the comments from being made in the first place. So I decided to look for something to beef up the fight against spam comments.
A few days ago I installed the reCAPTCHA WordPress plug-in . You can still leave comments but now you have to prove you’re human by typing a word into the captcha box. Those spammers are smart SOBs. The CAPTCHA plug-in may or may not be effective but there were still dozens of spam comments yesterday. How they bypass the CAPTCHA is over my head but they’re doing it somehow.
If these spammers are smart enough to figure out how to bypass the CAPTCHA box, you’d figure they’d be smart enough to figure out a way to get links without spamming. Oh well. To each his or her own. Some people get satisfaction from beating the system.
The links to this blog keep growing even though I don’t do much to build links anymore. When I first created this blog I did a lot of link building activity to get the flywheel moving. Anymore all I do is make a post almost every day. I have systems in place that build links without my involvement and I’m working on more.
Back to fighting spam comments though. I know a lot of visitors have their own blogs. I read many of them. What are your most effective strategies for preventing spam comments?
Tags: Monetization, Domain Names
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4 Comments
Have you tried Spam Karma? Here’s a link to a guide so that you can use Spam Karma and Askimet for a layered defense.
http://andybeard.eu/2007/05/akismet-spam-karma.html
I don’t know if it will solve your problem though. I must have a setting on in Akismet (that I cannot find now) that keeps me from seeing the spam because it seems to delete it automatically. I wonder how many false positives I’ve had…
I’ve installed this and will report back what results I’ve seen.
Steve
[Steve,
Thanks for the insight. I'll check this out. In my experience Akismet is very good at identifying which comments are spam vs which are legitimate...but it's not perfect. Every once in a while Akismet will mistake a legitimate comment for spam but it happens so rarely I bet you haven't had many false positives. If I remember correctly, Aksimet has identified over 3,000 spam comments on this blog and I bet I've had less than 10 false positives.
Robert]
Hi Robert,
I recently installed Comment Timeout from http://www.jamesmckay.net/code/comment-timeout/ on my blog and it has greatly reduced the spam.
What it does is turn off the comments on a post after a specific period of time. I’m using the default settings with it. This plugin plus Akismet has eliminated the majority of the incoming spam.
Terry
[Terry,
Thanks for your comment. I noticed that plugin while making a comment on your blog recently. I'll install that plug-in too.
Robert]
Robert,
I have several “walls” between the spammer and a comment finally getting viewed on http://www.brentriggsblog.com:
1- CAPTCHA
2- a “spam and profanity” word list; if one of these words are found, the comment is kicked back, and never submitted. The user has a chance to remove it
3- one a comment is free of common designated spam words, it is allowed to be submitted but if the submitter comes from a list of blocked IP addresses, then they are redirected to SPAMHAUS and the message deleted.
4- human moderation is the last filter.
With these, I’ve gone from dozens, if not hundreds of spam comments a day, to maybe one or two.
Just thought I’d share what has really worked for me. Askimet sounds like it does a pretty good job too, althought I wonder if legitimate comments are getting caught in the process.
Brent
[Brent,
Thanks for sharing. Those are some good ideas.
Robert]
The plugin I’ve been using is called Comment Spam Stopper. Here’s the site if you want to check it out:
blue-anvil.com/archives/wordpress-comment-spam-stopper-plugin
[Aaron,
Thanks. I will check that out.
Robert]
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