I’ve had feedback recently from readers of ProBlogger that some of you are having trouble leaving comments due to my spam filter being too harsh on you.
Please accept my apologies for this. I’ve been under a massive comment spam attack (thousands per day) for a couple of months now at this blog. My spam filter catches virtually every one of them – however in doing so it seems to kill a few genuine ones also.
One way around this if you are one of the people who is being blocked from commenting is to register as a user of this blog. You can do this via this Registration Form.
This SHOULD allow you to comment on any post without being blocked by the filter. Let me know if you have any further problems.
Thanks, Darren. Just testing, you understand. ;)
What spam filter do you use?
spam karma
Spam Karma has the reputation of being too restrictive and killing too much false positive. Blocking 1000 spams is good, but no one notices it. Blocking 1 legitimate comment is bad since 100% of people involved is upset about it :)
So far I’ve had excellent results with Bad Behavior that prevents most (99.99%) spam robots from even accessing your site (so they cannot submit comments), combined with Auto Moderate Comments, a plugin that automatically sends comments & tb on posts older than XX days into the moderation queue (since comment spam targets old posts)
On my blog, Bad Behavior blocks about 12000 spam attempts a week (comment, trackback and referral spams), Auto Moderate Comments taking care of a very few spam comments that get through.
I’ve mentioned Bad Behavior here before, I think. I’ll refrain from linking it, for a Google search will turn it up under either spelling as #1. :)
One thing to be sure of is that you are using Spam Karma 2, rather than 1. It works a whole lot better. And by using SK2 and Bad Behavior in combination, you can cut the flood of spam to a tiny trickle, meaning that if SK2 does happen to catch a legitimate comment, you don’t have to sort through hundreds of spams to find it.
Full disclosure: I happen to be the author of Bad Behavior.
Finally :) I was going to hate your blog, coz it always detect me as spammer. Even if I said hello :) Anyway I think its my first comment here so hello !!
Just a suggestion, forget about spam karma and the bayesian anti-spam techniques, just use an Auth-image easy, it work 100% and good bye spammers.
I’ve actually had more problems recently with spam sent through my contact form than with comment spam. Very annoying. Sounds like Bad Behavior might do the trick, as it prevents access to your site entirely. Any idea if auth-image can be hooked up with a contact form?
Thanks, nickel
@hatem: Heh, I hate captchas; they aren’t accessible to many people, for one thing, some of them are entirely unreadable, and some research shows that spammers can easily get around them if they were motivated to do so.
@fivecentnickel: Bad Behavior will protect your WordPress contact form.
Worked Like a Charm!
Tom
Thanks!
Bummer. I installed Bad Behavior last night and, while it has blocked a number of access attempts, I awoke this morning to another batch of contact form spam. I’m also curious as to what it looks like when someone gets blocked. From the script it seems that it presents an error page with contact info, but I’d like to see what it looks like myself.
Okay, I managed to spoof the Googlebot using a Firefox extension and I got blocked, so it’s clearly working. I guess the contact form spambot isn’t breaking the Bad Behavior rules.
I’ve been using IO Error’s bad behaviour for the last few weeks and it has practically eradicated the spam comment problem completely
@fivecentnickel.com:
I’d love to see the log entries from your contact form spammer, so that I can figure out what he’s doing and block him. Email badbots at my domain.
Also, I posted an example error page some months back, though I admit it isn’t all that easy to find. :)