I’ve been getting inundated with comment spam lately. WordPress has a nifty feature called Akismet that blocks most of it out and puts it in a queue for me to check over before dumping it. I’m used to the occasional “Hi. I love your blog. Check out my deal on Viagra” type comments, but lately, the comments have been pretty weird:
- “love give give – that is all that table is capable of , steal plane is very good tournament”
- “, increase soldier is very good soldier”
- “rape table is very good boy pair will player unconditionally, expect play do – that is all that round is capable of”
- “to kill corner you should be very universal when tournament percieve cosmos loose , girl will player unconditionally”
- “grass can forecast slot: when grass is grass it will roll chair”
- “con soldier is very good cards: international is feature of astonishing gnome , industrious chair steal or not”
Each comment also has random words set up as hyperlinks that go to sites like CNN, USA Today, MSNBC and Hollywood Reporter, which is odd since I wouldn’t think those well-established sites would need to go spamming the backwaters of the blogosphere for traffic.
The URL for each spammer is often one of several sites (not to be mentioned here) that have to do with movies. I won’t click through from my dashboard (so as not to encourage these vermin) so who knows what’s really there, but I’ve been getting inundated with this garbage.
So far Akismet and WordPress have been effective and caught 471 comment spams. Akismet remembers the spammers’ URLs, IPs and content and becomes more effective each time it catches something. In addition to that, WP holds any comment with three or more links for moderation. Still, a few are suddenly getting through. WordPress has a number of plug-ins available for CAPTCHA so I’m installing one (Bot Check) that looks easy to do. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try a different one.
I hope this isn’t inconvenient for anyone. I would appreciate it if someone would post a comment here so that I know it works, and please email me if you see problems or can’t comment. Unless you’re a spammer in which case please go to Hell.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
Good luck with it, man. I’ll be watching to see how things fare with your new spam filter.
I’ve tried the auto-close comments thing but that doesn’t stop trackbacks.
Blog ON…
i don’t have a huge problem with comment spam, but when i do get one, it’s sometimes hilarious, always strange. those examples are pretty funny.
GTL, I haven’t had trackback spam (yet), but the new CAPTCHA plug-in seems to be working so far. I haven’t had any spam today (knocking on wood). We’ll see how this goes.
Joey, I agree that sometimes they’re funny and worth keeping (though I delete the links) especially when they say they agree with the previous commenter when there is no previous commenter.
Looks like it is working…I had a “Turkish Hacker” He got into my news releases on my website too…. You are not alone.
Good Luck!!
Dwayne
Spam is the enemy. I’m bummed to hear that you’re having this issue with WP. But I’ll join the fight. As one of your readers, I don’t mind entering the code at all.
I’ll look forward to hearing how captcha and Akismet work for you.
Dwayne & Chris, thanks for testing. I’m glad to know it’s not too inconvenient.
WP blogs have been getting slammed with this stuff lately. Akismet was working great alone until just a few weeks ago. Maybe someday I’ll turn off CAPTCHA and just rely on Akismet, but then deescalation never seems to work in a war…
Interesting… thanks again for the updates, sir…