300 spam comments per hour!
Words by Daniel Aleksandersen on 2007-07-13
Do I really need to disable comments entirely!? The Web Design Journal is receiving three hundred junk comments per average hour. Askimet is drowning, and so am I.
My tiny weblog is receiving more junk comments than readers per hour. I think it is insane! Sure, my site has got good rankings in search engines and therefor links from my site are valuable. But this is just too much!
I have no idea how to deal with it anymore. If your comment is trapped by Askimet, then say bye-bye to it. I cannot browse trough all the junk to find the accidentally trapped comments anymore. I would need a full-time employee to moderate comments on my websites to handle it.
I have applied all the anti-junk comment filtering I can come up with that does not break the comment form's accessibility. It just is not enough. I will give alternate methods of fithing spam a try. If they fail then I will be forced to disable comments for good.
10 comments
I had to disable comments at http://www.beedigital.net/blog , now only registered users can post.
That spam comments were getting me crazy….
Flash Prayer at 2007-07-13 @805.
I recently installed Bad Behavior along side Askimet and I rarely see any spam that makes it as far as Askimet. Maybe 2-3 a week.
Jim (Subscribed) at 2007-07-13 @955.
I think if Askimet can't handle it, you'd have to look for other options.
WraithStrider at 2007-07-13 @019.
Reply to everyone in turn:
User registration to post comments means that no none will post a comment. That is not what I want to see. However it might be a solution if this does not stop.
The problem with Bad Behavior is that it flags too many genuine comments. (Not that there are that many, but still….)
I think Askimet is great, but it is apparent that there are weaknesses in Askimet that is being exploited.
Daniel Aleksandersen at 2007-07-13 @057.
First off, doesn't that "What year is it" thing work for you? There are a lot of variations. You can have those that do the whole image thing, you can have those math plugins, and you can install Spam Karma 2 and try to tweak it.
But disabling comments; even enabling for only registered users doesn't really make sense.
Only really, really, reeeeaaalllly large sites (that frankly get enough traffic to ignore a few commentors) can get away with membership required for comments. And even then, I hate logging into LifeHacker, just to leave a comment.
Baz L (Subscribed) at 2007-07-14 @058.
The year thing does work. However I still get tons of spam. I think most of it is beeing submitted straigth to the database, bypassing the comment form entierly. I have no idea how it is done. Pings and trackbacks are disabled.
I will probably just have to stop accepting comments at all.
Daniel Aleksandersen at 2007-07-14 @091.
Nothing can send spam straight to your database. Here are a few things to check:
1. Upgrade your version of Wordpress to a fairly current one.
2. Install a proper spam plugin. I don't know how your year thing works, but it doesn't seem like it works well enough. Get a plugin that does math, or the images or something.
3. Try Spam Karma 2. SP2 is great. You just have to make sure you tweak it a bit so that it doesn't filter out too much stuff. It basically gives every comment a rank (Karma) based on different things. The way it's submitted, how old the post is, when was the last comment from that user, etc. And it rejects based on that. You can have it running along side Akismet with no problems.
Not accepting comments…come on now. That doesn't seem like a proper solution from a guy running "The Web Design Journal"
Baz L (Subscribed) at 2007-07-14 @275.
I totally sympathise. My blog gets hundreds of spam comments trapped by Akismet, but nowhere near 300 per hour! That's just incredible. I wonder how so many spammers came to discover your site?
Brian Heys at 2007-07-18 @197.
The Web Design Journal's front page has Google PageRank 7/10. In other words: A link from my site is worth a lot SEO-wise. That is giant draw back of getting a high page rank.
Daniel Aleksandersen at 2007-07-18 @207.
Something with CAPTCHA I think will do the job.
A at 2007-07-19 @732.
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