When I converted this site to WordPress, I decided to turn on commenting, and see what happened. I have gotten a fair number of really good comments, and from people I didn’t know, which was cool. I also got a ton of comment spam (most of which never made it online). Not cool.
So I did a few things about it.
WordPress 1.5 has a number of new features that make dealing with comment spam a little easier, and I’ve adopted those, while also disabling all of the anti-spam plug-ins I had been using in WordPress 1.2. I also recently implemented some suggestions for making it a little harder for automated commenting, adopting a few of the ideas from A short monograph on the theme of blog comment spam, and a couple from Tom Raftery.
I had a problem with the fake form I implemented, because of a misplaced “%”, which caused it to show up and screw up the regular form. That’s fixed, and I think the fake form should be invisible to everyone using a modern browser.
Hard to say how effective it really is at this point, too soon to tell. But at least so far, no spam comments have been left since I implemented the changes and new traps.
Hi Michael,
how’s the blacklist working out for you?
One of the tactics I used in creating the blacklist was to include periods after the words so I have spamword. instead of spamword – this will allow people to include the word poker in their comments without the comment being nuked (unless it is at the end of a sentence!) and will nuke comments with a link to http://www.spamword.tld
Tom
@Tom: One of the tactics I adopted from your list was the short list of kill words for my black list. If people haven’t blacklisted online poker yet, they should. And at some point poker probably should be, too.
Here’s the best response to poker spam I’ve come across.
Yup, it looks like everything is working all peachy-like again. Now if I could remember which post I originally wanted to comment on and why…
Hi Michael,
thanks for the mention and good luck with your anti-spam strategies!
Tom