21,359 comment spams in a little over six months, with most of those coming in the last three months. I’ve gotten comment spam for porn sites, pharmaceuticals, cut-rate mortgages, insurance and more. Over the past couple of weeks it seems that more spam has slipped though my filter. I loath spam and those that deliver it. Spammers are about as low a life form as the amoeba. But they are crafty buggers who are always looking for ways to “improve” their business.
To fight the spammers, I cranked up the sensitivity on Spam Karma 2 a notch. It helped some, but still isn’t where I want it to be. I’m trying to avoid installing a comment “captcha” system, because I find those things incredibly annoying. (A captcha is that goofy “type this number/word/whatever into this little box so we know you’re a human” thing.) Here’s a great blog post by Maureen Francis that expresses my feelings on captchas.
Note to commenters: the increased sensitivity in SK2 may mean your legit comment gets shoved into the “moderate” box. I’ll get your comment moderated as quickly as I can, but it will stay hidden until I do.
So I just armed myself with another anti-spam weapon, it’s a WordPress plug-in called Bad Behavior. It’s supposed to play well with Spam Karma and help squish those pesky spam bots. We’ll see how they do. If the spam continues to be an issue, we’ll hit it with something else. If any avid reader out there notices anything goofy, or sees any spam get through, I’d appreciate a little note (Thanks Jim!)
This is war, and the spammers will not win.
[tags]Bad Behavior, comment spam, Spam Karma, spammers suck[/tags]
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
This is one of the advantages of the RealTownBlogs platform … we were hit by spam once, over the span of a few hours, and haven’t been hit since. There are various things I’d love to see adjusted on the platform and one of these days I may purchase a domain to point there instead, but for now it’s worked well.
nice blog!
I don’t rank the spammers as low as the hackers that create adware… but they are pretty low in my book.
Since my blog is so new, I haven’t been hit yet… but I am looking into ways to secure my site from them.
I don’t like captcha’s, either… but I am sure I will have one soon.
Jay –
I have been happy with Bad Behavior and Spam Karma. I haven’t upgraded to the new version of BB, but will when I have the time to figure it out.
The war with the spammers is a constant battle, and I’m just happy (and grateful to) for the open-source developers for their efforts.
It takes a village to fight the spammers …
Someone else below asked this already.
I am getting nailed with Spam in my website for our blog website. Is there anyway to stop this? If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up and active. Any help will be greatly appreciated. http://www.profesjonalna-reklama.pl
Thanks Keep up the good work. Greetings from Poland
Very nice blog! Thank You
Guy you need to try out SpamKarma2 from Dave, its really good for spam junk, helped me to get rid of it on my Blogs. tested also Akismet but it didnt worked as good as Spamkarma2.
Spam is the Bain of my life, it reminds me of that monty python sketch Spam Spam Spam. Spamkarma is the best for keeping it a bay.
Spamkarma2 is the bees knees, or dogs gonads for me.
Well I’ve found Akismet to work really well. You should at least feel honoured that your blog is that popular that spam bots find it easily. I guess, though, that that’s all you can get on the positive side for this problem. SpamKarma2 may be a little too much, though, because it does throw a lot of genuine comments into the trash can and then you just have the opposite problem of sifting through all the spam to find the real comment. It may be easier rather to have the problem of deleting spam manually rather than sifting through it manually.
I think I found the software for all of the spam…it was left in one of my blogs…”Comment Poster”….this crazy stuff. I’m tired of deleting the spam in our comments.
I was looking for home-related sites and found your site. It looks like you’ve experienced the same experience that we, or perhaps everybody else, had.
Just several months ago, our support system had to change several IPs and URLs because spammers can get their way into it. The worst thing was, they redirect all orders into their site. Plain and simple stealing in a very hi-tech way, isn’t it?
Akismet is really good, no doubt about that. But soon enough these spammers will beat Akismet.
Hey Jay,
I am just now setting up my WP blog for my landscaping website. I’ve transfered all the WP files to my hosting server and picked out a cool theme. I was wondering what plug ins you use. I’m not really a tech guy but I’m trying to get a good blog going and I’ve been reading through yours. I do have to say that I really like the way you have it all set up. If you have any good input on getting a nice blog going, please send my an email if you could.
Thanks,
Matt