I’m asking for recommendations to curb the amount of spam comments that I’m getting…wow.
I use Wordpress, and I have it set to approve comments only if the user has previously posted a comment. It puts comments into moderation if they have two or more links. I don’t want to make it so strict that I never receive even legitimate comments….but its annoying that I’m having to sift through 100+ comments a day about Viagra and porn in order to find and approve the good comments.
Any ideas?
This last one was the kicker: “tranny porn tranny porn http://sebastidrefus.spazioblog.it tranny porn”. Who the fuck wants to look at tranny porn anyway? =P
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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Because very few people actually ever comment (I use a wordpress theme as well) I have it set to 2 links = spam, and all comments must first be approved by me before they go onto the site. I only ever get 1-5 comments typically anyhow, and that’s barely anything to look through, and every single spam comment I’ve gotten (.. I had 800 that were tagged for deletion yesteray) always has more then one link in it.
If you are using wordpress you should activate Akismet spam protection (under the “Manage” tab I believe). It works incredibly well. My blog, which has been up since October, has had less than 10 spam comments slip through the filter and await moderation or get posted. That’s not bad considering I get a fairly decent amount of spam each day.
Hey…I heard you can get some Equal Opportunity stuff going at work for good tranny porn
(inside joke guys..hehe)
Our blog had the same problem not too long ago. At this point, we’re using the following solution:
1. Akismet is a godsend. I’m jumping on the bandwagon here — Akismet is probably the most potent weapon you have to fight spammers.
2. We use the “must have an approved comment” option.
3. We manually delete user registrations that appear to be spammers. They’re pretty easy to spot, and often use foreign or ill-reputed free mail addresses. I’ve seen blog owners reporting this as a huge problem, but thankfully (so far) it hasn’t been for us.
At this point, we get somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-300 spam posts in an average day. Akismet occasionally misses one or two before the algorithms adapt, but I’ve never had a comment make it to moderation that wasn’t picked up when I rechecked the queue. Since we activated Akismet, I’ve seen one or two comments in the Akismet queue (on days when it was of a manageable size) that were legitimate, but that’s been pretty danged rare.
You may also want to try a spam blocking plugin like Bad Behaviour.
Thanks guys! Akismet has been a godsend, blocking like 100 spam messages a day. Thanks so much for the suggestion =)
I’m using haloscan for my comments and I’ve never got a spam comment yet, which I think is somewhat of an achievement for a blogger blog! I originally switched to it for the trackback function (since blogger still hasn’t got around to implementing it) but the spam protection turned out to be excellent!
Or maybe the spammers just think my blog isn’t worth it, lol.