Comments on: Combating Comment Spam

By: Frank C

Frank C — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:07:28 +0000

I’m going to have to try out that NoFollow Free plugin although I’d probably set the threshold a bit higher. I’ve got several older post pages that are PR4 now and I’m sure they would be hit hard by repeat spammers.

One annoying trend I’ve seen lately is the same spammer hitting the same posts over and over again with a script running through proxies. I had one post have over 100 comments added to it within about 30 minutes. Fortunately I had moderate new commentators turned on so no comments of theirs got posted but it was quite annoying.

By: Emma

Emma — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:55:24 +0000

I use Akismet, and have comment moderation enabled. I never heard of bad behaviour though so I may look into that. I am going to implement some of your spam stopping steps.

By: Cromely

Cromely — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:28:15 +0000

Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with the issue too much. That may be one of the perks of a blogger blog. Spammers may not want to bother with what some don’t consider “real blogs.” Or maybe I don’t use the “right” key words.

I used to have the captcha enabled, but it seemed to cause problems for folks running the McAfee internet security suite. I think something in the firewall was blocking the image, but I’m not sure.

Regardless, I got rid of the captcha and replaced it with simple comment moderation. I don’t have or publish strong policies.

If a comment includes a relevant link, I’ll likely let it go through. If there’s not much connection, or it is clearly spamming, I’ll nuke it. How strict that screening process is really depends on my mood that day. A few spam comments have probably gotten through, but it hasn’t been a major issue.

Freedom of the press is great, but the improtant thing to remember is that it belongs to those that own the press.

By: Turnip

Turnip — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:03:49 +0000

I.ve used it for 10 months. Just yesterday I turned the honey pot on. No legit user ever had an issue.