Comment Spam is Exasperating
Dec 27th, 2007 by Alex
I am being flooded with comment spam. Now I know I’m not special in this regard; everyone who uses the Internet has to deal with spam. Whether in email or comments, removal is always more tedious than detection. I’m not a huge fan of closed-source services, but Akismet has been doing an excellent job of insulating me from spam comments appearing on my pages. But now — for reasons unknown to me — the spam comments are coming in to the tune of several hundred per day.
In the past I would review the comments that Akismet had flagged as questionable. Every once in a while a legitimate comment gets improperly flagged and I like to catch them to better train the filters. I’m not sure what I’ve done to make myself more visible to comment spam bots lately, but with this sort of volume it gets to be a drain on my time looking through everything… more so if the volume increases at all.
Akismet-detected comment spam is automatically deleted after 15 days, whether I’ve looked at it or not. I’m tempted just to let it purge them off without checking them. The only downside is the database. If I let it sit for 15 days, that’s upwards of 3,000 comments that the DB has to manage, index, and sort through every time a page is loaded. More load on the server.
I’m both torn and rather undecided about what to do at the moment, but something is going to have to be done. It is getting tad ridiculous.
I’m somehow the recipient (along with hundreds of others) of email spam being sent out (seemingly) from the cafe’s domain. Great. JUST what I needed…and especially at Christmas.
Spammer assholes, die die die.
Carol: And you’re getting lots of backscatter too, right? Consider ditching the catch-all address, as mokiejovis recommended to me. Spammers do suck. Hard. Never in a good way either.
If you are looking to rid yourself of the spam menace with a pretty good rate of success, I would use Spam Karma 2 in tandem with Akismet. It works pretty damn good.
The only issue I have is the blatent ping-back/trackback spam. You know the ones that only have part of or link to your post, then have nothing but ads on their site. Now, if I could get a system to remove them, that would be truly awesome.
Nonetheless, to alleviate the spam problem in your comments, Akismet+Spam Karma 2=Happy Blogger.
I’ve never used Spam Karma, but I’ve had a huge success with BadBehavior + Akismet. It uses blacklists to disable access to your blog by known spammers, and even has a built-in utility for real, living humans to be granted access in the case of a false positive.
The benefit of this is that BadBehavior has a demonstrable method of functioning and it’s the first line of defense, which means I get to keep the anti-spam voodoo of Akismet to a minimum.
I’m on Blogger and I had to turn on the turing test to stop the comment spam. It never got more than several a day, but that was bad enough.
Unfortunately I can’t get rid of the catchall address — it’s the “info@” address…and it’s on my business cards, the website (on the website it’s munged so it’s not picked up by spambots)…I know where the spam is coming from — I’m on a restaurant-listing website and they had a “mailto:” link that used that address. I sent them a stern email and told them to remove it — hopefully they will soon.
mokie: Well, it’s installed. Easy enough, right? Unzip and activate. We’ll see what happens.
yellowjkt: Turing as in the image-based captchas?
Carol: Does most of the spam come to that address? or to others? If others (that you don’t use), you could just setup an alias for info to get sent to you and reject the other wildcard addresses.
No, no — I’m not *getting* spam to that address — gmail handles all of my spam quite nicely, so I rarely see any spam. The spam is being “sent” with that address as the “reply-to” — so it looks like I’m sending out the spam, but of course I’m not. DIE SPAMMERS DIE.