The past couple of days, I’ve been getting deluged with comment spam. Fortunately, WordPress prevents virtually all of it from showing up where anyone can see it but me. That’s still unacceptable. I’m getting ready to have my blog automatically trash any comment that mentions “poker” or a pain medication other than aspirin. You have been warned. ;-)
As a stopgap measure, I installed lr2Spam by Anton Olsen. After activating it, I successfully left a test comment (and then deleted it). We’ll see how it works for the rest of you…
If you have problems publishing a comment on my site, please contact me.
Comments
4 responses to “I’m fighting comment spam”
Comment Blacklist is your friend :) Just add the offending words related to gambling or pharmaceuticals to the blacklist and the comments won’t even make it to moderation. Before 1.5 I used my own hack which checked the comment against a list of words and would die() with a nasty message if it contained any of those words.
Mike, I’m probably going to take your suggestion. Since I installed lr2Spam, two people other than me have commented successfully, so it looks like it’s not stopping the comments I want. I’m curious whether it blocks the spam.
In the past couple of days, I was slammed with about four or five big batches of spam for Tramadol, various types of poker (does anyone really gamble online?), and sex sites. Unfortunately, “poker” is a reasonable word for someone to want to use in a comment, but most pharmaceuticals and sex words could be put on the blacklist.
I wish there was some way to put the spammers out of business. I like the screen saver Lycos was distributed, then stopped. I understand it would generate bandwidth on the spammers sites. If enough people used the screensaver, the spammers could end up with large bandwidth costs. :-D Unfortunately, Lycos determined that the screen saver might have legal problems and pulled it.
How is lr2Spam working for you? Are you still using it?
Since I wrote it and installed it on lr2.com and anton.lr2.com I’ve gotten exactly one spam and it was posted manually by someone using IE. They read a few posts then tried to make the spam look real by answering a question in an existing comment. They got stopped in moderation so it wasn’t a problem.
Anton, I think I’ve had one or two comment spams since using lr2Spam. That’s a major success in my book. I haven’t seriously considered using anything else, it’s working so well.
I have an interesting side effect. I have WordPress configured to e-mail me whenever a comment is posted. I still get the e-mails when a spammer attempts to leave a comment, but the text is empty and there is no comment to delete.
I really appreciate your work in developing and releasing lr2Spam.