Comment Spam

mid-morning on Saturday, the 19th of February 2005 by Chad

If you are a long time blog reader you know that for months, many sites have disabled commenting, or taken other extreme measures to cut down on the comment spam. Seems that the subhuman monsters that do this have created automatic bots that just create message upon message in the comment areas of blogsites.
We were hit pretty badly here, then I installed the auth-image plugin that prompted each commentor with an image of a 6 character string that you had to manually type in to enable the comment to appear. This was 100% effective.
Since upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress, I updated the plugin to a newer offering called Spam Karma. Spam Karma is an all in one solution, that does many things to see if you are a spammer. One good thing is that it will only use the image prompt if it can’t quite figure out that you are in fact a good commentor. So most people should not have to do anything special. This is good.
But what I think is the nicest thing, is that it keeps track of how many comments are tagged as spam. In the upper right corner of the blog, you can see the stats block. Right now, after less than 24 hours, this is what it looks like:
statistics Total comments: 337 Total pingbacks: 3 Total trackbacks: 4 Total spam blocked: 258
258 spams were blocked. Within 15 minutes of plugging in this new feature, it was at almost 40 spams caught. They’re relentless. After each spam is caught, further posts from that IP address are blocked from further posting. If you’re a Wordpress user, after upgrading to 1.5, the first thing you should do is enable Spam Karma. Thanks to Dr. Dave… I appreciate what you’ve done!

*Update - Only a few hours after this initial posting, we already have more attempted comment spam than actual comments. It really is a shame that those “people” who spam for a living can’t get any sex because they’re too damn ugly and smell funny.

If you’re having problems posting comments, and they are legitimate, please let me know!