Less Comment Spam

Comment spam has been on the rise lately, and I’ve been deploying anti-spam software on the blogs to counteract the recent increase in spam activity.

Akismet is a great tool, sorting out 99.8% of the comment spam I’ve received in the last couple of months with very few errors. Available as a plug-in to WordPress, and for many other systems, it has certainly reduced the burden of manually moderating every comment I receive.

But, I’ve enjoyed a couple of entirely spam-free days courtesy of WordPress Hashcash. This plug-in silently causes the visiting browser to perform a small computation that fails on some of the software used by comment spammers. I had to hack on it a little to force it to work on the photoblog, but otherwise it’s a great tool. I’m currently running Hashcash with Akismet still lurking in the shadows as backup.

I’m sure that spammers will eventually catch on; but minimally, Hashcash is going to slow them down. And, for the time being, I’m seeing zero comment spam!

Give Akismet and Hashcash a try, and let me know what you think.

8 replies on “Less Comment Spam”

  1. I’ve been using Akismet too recently and it seems pretty good. A bit still gets through, mostly very low content spam messages. Actually, they’re so low content I don’t even understand why someone is sending them, since they have no links and nothing but a couple random words in them.

  2. Oh, those comments are harbingers of doom. That is to say, once a person has a comment approved at a particular blog, some blogs allow them to post un-moderated in the future.

    Those blank comments (and some that are just vapid praise) are hoping to sneak in , get approved, and then open the doors to un-moderated spam in the future.

    You should have a look at porting it over to Bloxom.

  3. Akismet seems to usually catch the vapid praise. I was guessing the empty comments were probably tests of some sort (calibrating the bot’s request query or something), but I wasn’t aware that some systems had the feature you describe.

    I did hook Akismet into Blosxom, which was pretty easy since it’s a network service. The hashcash idea is interesting, but would be more work to port and maintain, particularly since WordPress is PHP and Blosxom is Perl so I couldn’t incorporate bug fixes trivially.

  4. Are you taking a stand against the random text generators like BotCheck orAnti Spam Image (which is what I’m currently using on my site)? After getting my first spat of spam that made it past Akismet, I felt that it was the easiest way to control it and I hoped that it wouldn’t be too annoying for my visitors. Since then I’ve been spam free.

    My favorite was when I posted some poetry and I got a spam saying that they had been looking for Woodworking sites and came across mine and that I should check out their site. Silly bots.

  5. I’m loathe to do it, but I’ve hear that many people have success with auto-closing comments on entries older than a certain date. I assume there much be some plugin to do that for wordpress.

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