Comments on: Stopping Comment Spam

By: Mib Black

Mib Black — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 13:04:57 +0000

Cool. With this site, my quest for Internet knowledge is for a short time over. Life is good again.

By: Collin

Collin — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 04:54:25 +0000

I was thinking about writing a plugin like wp-gatekeeper a few days ago. Lo and behold, here it is. I may implement it soon. Suprisingly, though, my spam has dropped to near zero (I got my first one in several days today) just by banning a few IPs in my .htaccess file.

By: Ryan Masuga

Ryan Masuga — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 04:25:07 +0000

The Gatekeeper Plug-In works magic for me. You make a up a question only a human would know, and they have to fill in this field before posting. That’s it. For example, “A coin worth $0.10 is called a…” Once someone has successfully typed “dime” the post can go through. You can set up a number of different questions as well. Works great. As the plug-in itself says, “the point is to write questions and answers are completely obvious to a human.” You can find it here: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/wordpress/wp-gatekeeper.html

By: Mike Harris

Mike Harris — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 04:00:12 +0000

I had my comment spam fall to almost zero by simply closing comments on entries older than five days.

By: Jon Maddox

Jon Maddox — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 16:59:49 +0000

I’ve completely changed the form element names in my comment fields. This immediatly shut down all of the comment “bots” and i haven’t seen the huge amount of comment spam again. I still have the random manual comment spam though. Which I weed out through moderation.

By: Fred Monroe

Fred Monroe — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 03:52:23 +0000

the other option is to have it send the user an email that they have to get and hit a confim link on although some spamers will pick up on this but there is no perfect system because there is always a way around anything (almost)

By: Collin

Collin — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 03:42:49 +0000

Actually, it is possible to decode a significant amount of captcha images. Take, for example, PWNtcha, a project dedicated to cracking captcha challenge/response images. It does so with very impressive results.

WordPress automatically adds the nofollow tag to link within comments, but apparently that doesn’t stop spammers.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 03:13:03 +0000

I moderate all my comments in order to keep them down.

I used to get a ton using MovableType and just kept a huge blacklist. I’m with Fred though, i wouldnt mind registering.

By: l008com

l008com — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:06:26 +0000

Also, i find some of the text images modify the text so bad, even as a human, i have a very hard time reading what they are saying. I wonder if thats due to teh same problem, people keep increasing the distortion thinking that the bots are getting smarter and smarter, when its really that a human is at the controls pasting everything in.

By: l008com

l008com — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 01:03:18 +0000

google search google’s new NOFOLLOW html tag. Also, I think the picture/text way is the only real way to make it easy for a human, impossible for a machine. But after looking at all the spam I get in my guestbooks, I think a lot of it is a human. Like someone just goes from site to site manually pasting stuff in your comments/guestbooks for hours each day. I just use a manual approval system and though its annoying, its not really a hassle at all. Even if i miss an email, the spam comment will never show up the site, it will just stay in limbo forever