A week ago, we made a few minor changes here, most notably a switch to Jetpack Comments. Since then, spam has dropped dramatically. Prior to the change, we received an average of 10,000 spam comments a day. After Jetpack Comments, we have received a grand total of 429 spam comments for the entire week. So, that’s a drop from an average of 10,000 per day to an average of 61 per day, 9,939 less spam comments per day. Jetpack Comments makes use of javascript and iframes, which are both a bit too complicated for most spam bots, and that does line up with the almost complete lack of obvious bot-generated spam in our spam queue. Besides the comforting bot-breaking ability of Jetpack Comments, I have a feeling that our change from a basic form element comment form to the comment_form tag finally enabled our other anti-spam plugins to work properly. […]
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‘Spam’ Category
If you’re a WordPress user, you probably noticed an option at Settings -> Discussion, which states “Before a comment appears, comment author must have a previously approved comment.” This was pretty much the bulk of our anti-spam measures here, and while not a single bit of spam made it through, the sheer volume of pending comments (almost all spam) were driving us nuts. A few days ago, we shifted gears with tremendous results, and I though you folks might be interested. We decided to do away with the above setting and rely entirely on Akismet, Cookies for Comments, and the built-in moderation list and blacklist at Settings -> Discussion for any that snuck through. Prior to this change, we had an average of 5 pending comments each hour, and an average of 4.8 of those were spam. Now, we don’t have to monitor pending comments, and we only see an […]
[Continue Reading...]It was not meant to be. I had high hopes for Intense Debate but the drawbacks outweighed the positives in our case. I was really looking forward to a few of the features that I thought might bring more interactivity to the blog and encourage readers to have meatier discussions. As you notice below, we have turned off Intense Debate and gone back to the original comment form. Below is a list of the some of the features I was really looking forward to and our experiences with them. I would like to preface this discussion by saying that I screwed up the install by adding this blog onto the wrong account and that added to some of our woes. The account bug that followed (we received some help via the support email) was caused by my fat fingering. Better overall look and feel of the comment section of a […]
[Continue Reading...]A few days ago, Project Honey Pot introduced a new service, http:BL, “a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites”. A honeypot is a trap set to detect email havesters and spam robots : this should ring a bell to most bloggers, I guess. The beauty of Project Honey Pot is that anyone can contribute : just register an account, download the script and put it somewhere on your blog. It’s been more effective than I would have thought and wished : the day I had my first honeypot installed, it detected a new and before unseen comment spammer. Contributing to this project is an easy way of making the web a cleaner place, and it will also benefit to another WordPress related spam-fighting project : the almighty Bad […]
[Continue Reading...]About the Author
- James
James began using WordPress in 2004. Being new to WordPress (and blogging in general), he quickly found the WordPress Support Forums and basically never left. James currently resides in sunny Southern California, where he enjoys bringing happiness to millions of WordPress.com users.
Web: http://macmanx.com
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Are You Spamming Comments Inadvertently?
In a blog post titles “6 Steps to Kill Your Community“, Matt listed “Allow Spam Through” as the second step and “Don’t Participate in Comments” as the fourth step to killing your community. We treat comments and reader participation very seriously at Weblog Tools Collection. We highlight commenters, try to identify the frequent comments who participate willingly and heuristically remove nofollow tags from the links of commenters who participate in the community. I have personally chosen and thanked frequent commenter by providing them deeper access and rights to the various portals, elevating and applauding their presence within the community and have chosen most of my co-authors based on their participation and passion within the communities that I purvey. In short, I agree with Matt in that relevant comments and passionate participation are the lifeblood of any community. But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are […]
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