I don’t know what I’d do without having some sort of spam filter catching comment spam on this blog. I returned yesterday from being out of town Saturday night and when I checked, I found more than 200 spam comments that had been stopped by Akismet, the WordPress spam filter. Only one of those comments was not spam.
This is a pretty good record considering the volume of spam that comes through. After running a blog for a while, I can see that comment spam is a growing problem and the solutions in place are good, but will not always be adequate. The sheer volume of spam is growing, possibly due to botnets running from zombie computers.
Sure, we can stop the comment and email spams a lot of the time once we’ve gotten them, but the huge volume of unnecessary and unproductive traffic on mail servers and the internet infrastructure has a cost, too. There are a number of people working on ways to combat this, but it’s going to take time to have any real effect and spammers will always find new ways to circumvent the countermeasures we put into place. A few will always get through.
As far as this blog is concerned, I think I’m going to be looking for more ways to prevent the spam from even getting into the Akismet filter. I do quickly review the comments before deleting them, just in case a legitimate comment is somehow caught. I’ve found only a few this way.
To keep your comment from being filtered as spam, make sure you include a real email address and a real web page url if you have one. I’ve noticed that some of those that are caught by the filter either don’t have these or include obvious fakes. Don’t worry; I’ll never spam you or share your email address (or website) with anyone else unless I have your explicit permission!
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Askimet stops hundreds of spam comments a day for both my blogs. If there is a way of stopping it all together I haven’t found it.
Hi Glen. I don’t think we’ll ever be completely free of spam. I’ll bet we’re probably at about the best level of protection from it that we’ll ever see. It’ll be a constant battle until the end of time. LOL.
BTW, I checked out your blogs. Very interesting niche and I’m really impressed by what you’ve done with it. Awesome!