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Comment SPAM

sduford on Dec 17 2006 at 11:29 am | Filed under: Blogging, Software

If you do not run a blog you may not be aware of this but comment SPAM is a big problem for blogs. People (or sometimes bots) go around the net and post worthless comments on blogs so they can post URLs to their penis enlargement or online gaming sites. Their real goal is not to have people who read the blogs click on those links, but rather to increase their rating on search engines like Google (those ratings are partly based on the number of sites that link to them).

I guess the amount of comment spam a blog gets is directly proportional to that blog’s popularity. When I first created this blog in October 2005, I was averaging 1 comment spam a week, I now average about 15-20 a day. Thankfully Wordpress offers a free plug-in called Akismet which catches comment spams and quarantines them. This is an incredible little piece of software: in 14 months of usage it has never let a spam through, and it has never identified a legitimate comment as SPAM. If I had to choose only one plug-in to use on my Wordpress sites, that would be the one.

6 Responses to “Comment SPAM”

  1. on 17 Dec 2006 at 6:15 pm 1Don Ray

    I agree with your on Akismet. I takes the risk and burden out of blogging because of comment spam. I have had two valid comments put into quarantine, but two out of about 12,000 is pretty good in my book.

    I also use the Bad Behavior plug in and it is telling me that it had blocked about 6,000 spambots over the last seven days. Between these two I see no comment spam.

    Now if there was just a way to exterminate the spammers.

  2. on 18 Dec 2006 at 7:29 am 2Quix0r

    As far as I can remember Akismet let pass (but into moderation queue because of commentors w/o a comment must be moderated) 10 comments and identified also around 10 harms as spam. This is in my view a good deal in change of how many spams will be displayed in my blog w/o this plug-in.

    Anyway. I also use some “generic” blocking software like Bad Behavior 2 and such. When you disable verbose logging it might run much faster and will not hurt your server. INSERT commands are mostly not delayed and will be directly executed and stored on your server. :)

  3. on 18 Dec 2006 at 2:00 pm 3sduford

    Thanks guys, I had not tried the bad behavior plug-in. I will definitely give it a try now.

  4. on 07 Mar 2007 at 10:24 pm 4Brian Di Croce

    Sylvain, have you heard about ‘wp-comment-spam-stopper’ from Blue Anvil (http://blue-anvil.com/)? Its objective is to stop bots from posting spam on your blog via the comments box. The idea is quite simple: you add an extra field in the comments box with a question of your own, such as “What number comes after 6?”, and there’s an input box which the user has to respond before being allowed to submit his/her comment. It’s worth checking out.

    Cheers!

    Brian

  5. on 07 Mar 2007 at 11:07 pm 5sduford

    Thanks Brian, I’ll check it out!

  6. on 08 Jun 2007 at 5:58 pm 6Quix0r

    How is it going? I guess still tons of medicine and porn spam? :(

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