My earlier post on reaching 5000 spam comments captured by Akismet raised some interest, as several commenters with blogs of similar ages have suffered more like 30,000 spams and asked what my plugins were.
So, in approximate order of how they intercept spam, here they are:
Bad Behavior: This one stops spam before it reaches the blog, specifically the PHP focussed spambots. By reading their ‘signatures’ and the use of blacklists, know spammers are prevented from accessing the comments section of your blog. This is an essential plugin, as aside from reducing spam from a few thousand a day down to dozens, it also prevents a massed spambot attack from taking your site offline.
More than one blogger that I’m aware of has been taken down by their host because a spambot attack was putting too great a strain on their shared server.
Simple Spam Filter: This is the clincher I feel for reducing spam on your blog, as it’s configurable by you, and is fully adaptive when spammers change their tactics. It comes with a list of simple spam words, which if it reads in the comment, will then challenge the commenter to prove they’re human by simply clicking a button to submit their comment. As a spambot won’t be able to confirm they’re human, the comment will get nuked.
The key here is that you can add to the list, either through just typing them in, or getting the filter to review your current spam folder, and then just selecting the words you want blacklisted. So, when the spammers had their recent bizarre attack of commenting ‘nice blog!’ or ‘Holy Tuesday!’ I just added the words ‘nice’ and ‘tuesday’ to my blacklist. This took the number of daily spam comments reaching Akismet down from 40+ to 4. Of course, after a while you can then remove words from the blacklist too.
You can get the original from the link above, or you can try the tweaked version from Stephen of More than Scratch The Surface.
Akismet: Yep, it comes with every installation of WordPress, but any spams getting through the first two will usually be caught here, so make sure it’s activated.
These three plugins took my daily spam moderation queue down from 400 to 3 or 4, most of which are human submitted rubbish. If I could wish anything for Christmas, it would be a painful death for all spammers…..
Any other complementary plugins available that are worth trying?
3 users commented in " My Spam Solution "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackMy spam solution is to let someone steal your domain name. Hey presto! No more spam!
Just published my story about how the hacker squirmed into my GMail account. If you’re using GMail I think it’ll interest you.
All the best Chris.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the link. I’ll point out that Joe Tan has indicated he’ll add my tweaks to the original Simple Spam Filter plugin in a future version (no word on when though).
Also, my favourite spam plugin at the moment is Simple Trackback Validation. It turns out most of the spam I was getting in Askimet was trackback spam, not comment spam. There was no way to tell, but there is a new version of Askimet now which is supposed to tell you (haven’t tried it yet).
Using Simple Trackback Validation got rid of almost all the spam I was getting. It checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is the same as the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to. It also checks if there is indeed a trackback on the other site. For the first three weeks, I sent the ones it caught to the Askimet queue, but there were no false positives, so now they are just nuked. It has to be said that I don’t use Bad Behaviour, so maybe these might have been caught by that, but I love this plugin.
Of course it’s not as effective as David’s solution! I saw you were hacked David – I was really sorry to hear that and I’m glad you’re back in control. I’m heading over to read about how it was done now.
Sounds like a good’un Stephen I’ll take a look.
It’s one way of doing it David……off for a read now.
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