kamilzadora.com

Yes, spam… nobody likes it everybody has it. Although my blog obviously does not get much traffic, the amount of spam comments I was getting was to much for me. Fortunatelly 3 simple plugins that work on different methods of protection helped to solve this issue in 99,99% (actually 100% for the moment :) but I guess it won’t last forever).

Here is my story – this blog has been setup about a year ago and just as it has been indexed by Google I started to have visitors, spam bots that is… I decided not to blindly install an anti spam plugins and see what they do but to take a more methodical approach. A bit of time invested in understanding ‘how stuff works’ can sometimes save you a lot of time later.

Phase one – the Big Gun.

If you have used wordpress for just a little bit of time you must have heard about Aksimet. It is a service provided by the Wordpress authors, that ‘learns’ what comments should be treated as spam. Since it is a single service that analyses comments from many blogs it has the possibility to find ’spam patterns’ and block them. It is very effective, but of course not in bullet proof. On avrage  1 of 70 spam comments has not been marked as spam. So – succcess!

Phase two- the Good Ol’ Boys.

I decided, to see how classic image based CAPTCHA can improve the situation, and if it will lower the total amount of spam in any way.  I decided to use reCaptcha (WP plugin) as I just love the idea that stands behind it – you need to solve 2 words – one that will do the ‘captcha’ thing and second one will help to digitize scanned books. So a bot should not be able to post a comment at all – but as we know most image captchas are broken… so is reCaptcha – the amount of spam comments dropped  merly by 20-30%… anyhow always a bit less to look through on the list.

Phase three – the Stinger missle.

Antispam Bee – the very lightwieght plugin that adds another layer of protection, by giving additional hidden input fields, that cannot be filled out by humans but bots will try to put something in them thus compromise themselves. With Antispam Bee enabled I was able to filter out what Aksimet missed. If I set the options to instantly delete the spam comment and not put it in the spam queue, the spam problem has dissappeared.  As I never trust the automatic solutions I decided to put all messages to spam queue for occassional review.

Hopefully there will not be any civilian loses, but if you cannot leave a comment, leave a comment to let me know ;).