Yesterday was the 12 month anniversary of installing Askimet and so far 306,453 spam comments have been stopped. Things seem to be getting worse though. Well over 1000 spam comments are coming in every day now and some days it is way more than that. I’ve also noticed the number of false-positives is going up so genuine comments are not getting through and with so many spams per day, it is difficult to monitor the spam list. Sapm is winning this war of attrition.
Damien Mulley
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I had to quit checking the spam queue for FPs after getting deluged a couple of months ago. Not getting 1k spams per day thank God – the positive spin on that figure is that at least someone thinks your blog is important Damien /*glances at mr spammer hiding behind his zombie network in the corner*/
As a matter of interest, Damien – are you getting those damn “ka-ka-sh-ka” spams?
I’m getting them at the rate of about 300 a day just from that crowd alone. They are driving me demented.
Damien
If you install Bad Behavior you should see a marked decrease, as it stops a lot of the junk from accessing your blog completely:
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/
Michele
And if you really want to go all out then set up a honey pot. There’s a WP plugin now for this. The IP I’m behind right now is blocked for spamming (wasn’t me mind – surely the PCs here are infested).
This is exactly why I switched to Blogger; its spam protection seems to be leagues ahead of anything that I could find for WordPress, and I don’t have to mess around installing anti-spam plugins all the time.
As per Michele’s suggestion, I have installed ‘Bad Behaviour’.
90% of spam is being eliminated including those damned “ka-ka-sh-ka� ones.
Michele – you’re a genius 🙂
I have to agree with Rob. We get zero spam with Blogger.
Blogger is full of comment spam if you have authentication off.
And don’t you use Haloscan, Colm?
*note to self. Must type properly*
Twenty, you’re right. I should have said “got” instead of get. We used Blogger comments at the beginning.
Twenty: I give people the choice between being logged in, or filling in a captcha. No spam problems, though of course I suppose it’s slightly more inconvenient for people with no blogger login.
Robert – a lot of people hate those captchas. Also, the blogger comments are pretty much feature free. You can’t edit them, can’t view IPs and really, once you get the Askimet plugin for WP there’s little or no spam.
The only problem I have with spam on wordpress is that occasionally a real comment gets flagged but real spam never gets through.
My blog is running off my own server and I’m noticing hundreds of attempts a day. Usually from the same few IP addresses. None of it is getting through but I do have it configured to log to a database which I can check. Or indeed anyone can check as I have a spam counter page on my site.
For the repeat IP addresses I just configure my firewall to drop packets from them. Although my counter is now at 7455 since the 27th of April it is kind of inaccurate as it does not count those that are being blocked by the firewall or those who are being dropped by their UserAgent in a htaccess file that I created. There are dozens per hour being blocked by my firewall alone.
For the curious, head to my own blog and search for spam and it will bring up my posts and a my methods of reducing it.