Let’s face it, we are all victims of comment spam. Without protection, even a 10-vistors-a-day blog will sooner or later fall victim to a tidal wave of commercial junk comments [94% of all comments are spam]
However, WordPress is blessed with a most efficient robust distributed approach to comment spam: Akismet, which uses API keys to assign trust to nodes and has wide distribution as a result of being bundled with the 2.0 release of WordPress. Combined with manual comment approval, not one single spam comment has gotten through.
Unfortunately, building high walls also keeps the ‘good guys’ out: many people just don’t feel like commenting anymore. Ever since I enabled “approve first” the number of legitimate comments has dropped dramatically. And although Akismet is the best comment spam filtering tool around, some legitimate comments must have been erased. I’m not about to read all daily 300 spam comments to make sure not to miss that potential false-positive.
Anyway, would you like to do me a favor? Just leave 1 single legitimate comment, it will make my day 
This blog is not affiliated with or endorsed by the city of Antwerp, Belgium.
One legitimate comment, coming right up!
Hundreds of Akismet trapped comments – not much fun reviewing so many, that’s for sure.
Just doing my part to try and offset that ever-growing percentage of crap.
Comment by Bill — January 18, 2007 @ 2:11 pm |
I’m listenting. I keep reading about akismet, and I don’t use wordpress, I use blosxom. I’ve been integrating SpamAssassin to handle content filtration, but I may have missed the boat on akismet. Another coder has already integrated akismet with Blosxom, so perhaps I should go check it out?
Anyway..perhaps I should also stop trying to be the l33t loner using a program that isn’t maintained anymore and just migrate to WordPress.
I code in perl, so it’s nice to know I can get under the hood and tweak things as I like them. Probably why I’ve stuck with it this long.
I haven’t gotten a legit comment in over a year, it’s all spam. Really sucks.
Comment by NUmbksi — January 18, 2007 @ 4:24 pm |
Don’t worry about the lack of comment. It just means plenty of people agree with your point of view.
Comment by LegitimateCommentMan — January 18, 2007 @ 4:45 pm |
It’s a pain, isn’t it … I had to do the same. Sorry I’m not a new voice though.
How is your home standing up to today’s high wind? Hope alles goed over your way.
Comment by Di — January 18, 2007 @ 6:40 pm |
Thank you all for posting.
-@ Bill: Thanks for posting. Akismet has really been a saver: I currently trust it so much that I no longer read the trash can. I also like its robust distributed approach and collective action concept.
) I just watched my balcony furniture end up at my neighbors, but so far no real storm damage. Had to discontinue my diving training though, but I’ll explain that later.
-@ NUmbksi: I would definitely migrate to Akismet, as it does a great job (virtually no false-positives)
-@ LegitimateCommentMan: Thanks, guess I just get a lot of ‘fast browsing visitors’ from the search engines.
-@ Di: Always a pleasure to read you (btw: great pic with the donkey, you actually look Irish
Comment by Peter - blog author — January 18, 2007 @ 7:44 pm |
Yeah, and I need to learn to type. U isn’t supposed to be capitalized, and I got the k and s reversed. Pfft. Perhaps one of these years I’ll learn to spell my own name.
Adding some stuff from your blog to my .htaccess has done much to help things. I’ve had a stroke of inspiration though. If we’re going to put all of this stuff in our .htaccess files, why don’t we do what spamd (or is it despam? don’t recall…) does and waste these spammers’ time?
I’m thinking instead of blocking them outright, do a mod_rewrite statement that points them to a script that will happily take their form input, and do two things:
1. Add it to a bayesian database.
2. Be….
really….
slow….
to…
return…………
Figure it certainly can’t hurt to try. Or maybe it can. meh.
Comment by Numbski — January 19, 2007 @ 4:54 am |