How Many Layers Are Necessary to Protect Against Comment Spam?
Published March 20th, 2007 in blogging, blogs, comments, spam, wordpress, wordpress pluginsI’ve been using Akismet to fight comment spam here on FreshBlogger and I have to say that it’s working great. Out of the literally hundreds of spam comments this blog receives each day, only one or two make it through to moderation, if any. Considering the absolute deluge of spam, this is a pretty good record. Akismet is also very good at avoiding false positives. It’s quite rare that I find a legitimate comment that’s been marked as spam.
With all this said, though, there are still way too many spam comments on this blog. I try to review at least the first couple of pages of spam comments each day in order to make sure there aren’t any real comments in there. This is tedious and time-consuming. I’m now thinking I need to do something a little different.
The experts say it’s best to take a layered or multi-pronged approach to fighting comment spam. I’m thinking this is very good advice and I’m ready to make some changes here. The obvious next step is to add some sort of verification to the commenting process. While this is an effective way of fighting spam, I don’t like the idea of making it harder for people to comment. I also absolutely hate captchas. If you’ve never heard that term before, they are the weird text images on login pages and comment forms that are not supposed to be able to be read by a bot.
I think the best solution to this problem is to use something like the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin. This seems to be about the least annoying way of blocking all but the most sophisticated spambots. Before I install yet another plugin on this blog, I’d really like to get some feedback from you. Can anyone tell me about their experiences using this plugin or one that is similar to it? Do you think this is the best way to fight comment spam?
Not sure about captchas. I had once installed it and half the people could comment and the other half couldn’t. So I dumped it. I figure at least SPAM makes me popular
Hi breadman. I can’t always read the captchas and I’ll bet this is common problem. I’m hoping the math plugin will block many of the spambots, but I can see how it might be possible to code the bot to fill in the correct answer. I guess spam is kind of like negative publicity: at least they’re talking about ya!
LOL.. breadman I agree with you. I don’t understand why people are so annoyed with spam. I think readers can spot spam comments from a mile away and usually don’t click them. At least I don’t. In fact, I approach with suspicion to anything unrelated that links somewhere else.
Hi Ilker. Unfortunately, the spam tends to be either a hundred lines of links to mobile home insurance, ringtones, or various kinds of porn involving pre-teens and farm animals. Believe me when I say that none of those happen to be common topics on this blog.
If that’s not bad enough, when I said there are literally hundreds each day, I wasn’t kidding. Today there are currently 297 spam comments caught by Aksimet since last night when I emptied it. I’m hoping to reduce the numbers that even get to the filter with the new plugin and I hope that doesn’t keep you and others from joining in the conversation. Thanks for your comment!
I used the Did You Pass Math plugin for a while. It works in the same way as the one you’re considering in that users need to answer a simple math question to post. I eventually just went back to Akismet for two reasons. The plugin didn’t stop all spam and sometimes a wrong answer meant having to retype the comment. Akismet lets the occasional comment through, but I’ve yet to see a false positive that required un-spamming so it’s good enough for me.
Ilker .. You probably might be reading this in your email account, if you ticked the bottom box to “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” .. Which, is a great invention because you (nor anybody else) has to come back here unless you want to and you know that someone added to your comments.
Now - imagine this blog without Akismet spam, and you received (what did ray say..) 297 emails since last night?
I think it’s more annoying to the subscribers, than the blog owner - but, it affects the blog owner if the subscribers are annoyed. If you don’t have comment spam plugins, you should remove the Followup box i.m.o.
@HART: Hehe.. well no I’m not reading your comment from my email account because I never use the “notify me via email” feature on any blog. I find tracking comments to be a second priority and I don’t like them to show up in between my important emails.
In case you didn’t know, there is a free service called co.mments that allows you to follow all the posts you want in one page. I think it is great and lets me stay on top of the conversation (of interesting blogs/posts) without disturbing my work.
So yeah, that is why I didn’t understand the big fuss about comment spam. Thanks for enlightening me though!
Hey HART, I didn’t even think about the emails. That would really suck because I would be getting those, too. They wouldn’t even be marked as spam by my email server because they would be coming from this blog!
Ilker, I’ll have to check out co.mments. I’ve seen the name pop up a bunch of times on other blogs. I actually like the email follow-ups on blogs I’ve commented on, though. I have to say I quickly lose track of all of the places I’ve commented and the emails make it quick and easy for me to stay in the loop. It’s usually very easy to unsubscribe, too.
Hi Marios. That would be a pain to have to re-type everything. The plugin that I’m considering actually is supposed to do away with that problem if I’m not mistaken, though. It seems like a small inconvenience in order to block a large number of the spam comments I receive. Of course, I don’t want to discourage anyone from commenting, so would you say having to put in the math answer would make you less likely to comment?
Would anyone else be less likely to comment if I use the math plugin here?
There is also the custom query plugin where you ask a question, like “what color are the yellow pages” etc .. I tried that and it seemed to work - but only if you change the custom word after a while, because after a while bots and scripts will answer yellow (translation: I removed it after about 2 weeks)
Honestly, I don’t even check my moderated comments or akisment or spam karma 2 comments in moderation. But - I did change in the options the number of links a reader can add to a comment before it’s automatically moderated. I figure that usually when I start linking in comments, there could be anywhere up to 6 links! So - I set it at that. If there’s 7 - you are out of luck. And, I just let the akismet/spam killer sort out the viagra-comments and links provided.
oh - the only thing I’m lacking - I should probably add that bit of info to my ABOUT page or something
so people at least know. but, I’m fortunate - nobody wants to comment on my blogs so, not many people get offended.
oh #2 .. I also tried co.comments .. >> hated it. I don’t want all my comments in one location. Like you, Ray .. it’s easy to just click on a column in my email folder and sort all incoming emails by date, by blog and browse the conversations - without even dropping by!
Yep. I was afraid that the bots would get smarter. It’s really inevitable, I suppose. I was just hoping to reduce the load on my site a little bit by blocking some of the spam at the door. I’m not sure if this is much of a concern, though. Like you, I’m not checking the comments blocked by Aksimet as much now because I just don’t have the time. Sometimes, I’ll delete them without even looking.
I do read every legitimate comment here and try to respond to each and every one. I also try to check out the blog or website of each commenter, too. I think that probably shows!
Maybe a comments policy would be the best place for that information, HART. I’ve been thinking about adding one here. My link threshold is much lower than yours, though.
P.S. I’ll have to comment more on your blogs so you don’t feel so lonely… I hope you don’t mind a few “way to go, dudes!”
You know .. you subscribe to any of my sites and/or I see your face in myBlogLog widget in the sidebar periodically .. that is nice too .. because I’ve been setting my feeds to full-feed, and if people actually coming to visit, there must be some reason (hopefully to surf!)
But, way to go’s are cool too!
Hmmm, I don’t know.. For me it’s a great tool. I don’t have to check out all the blogs that I commented on and it only shows me when a new comment is there. All I have to do is to click the bookmark “Track comments” when I’m on a post that I like to follow the comments and its all aggregated in one page I check daily.. it’s like an email account only for comments. The good thing is that it’s all made in AJAX, so I don’t have to click unsubscribe to go to another page, then click confirm to unsubscribe and then get a page that says “you successfully unsubscribed.” It also allows you to get all the comments in a single feed if RSS is your thing. Here is a screenshot to illustrate my point.
Don’t get me wrong.. I’m not paid to advertise these guys (I think Cocoment does the same thing) but I too hesitated to use it in the first place and later found it really useful. It now makes my life a lot easier. I even made a post about it
Ilker, after looking at the screenshot, I think I might just check that out. It looks simple and straightforward and also will allow me to follow the conversations that don’t have email follow-ups available. Thanks for pointing out the benefits.