Spam or not spam, that is the question…

If the post is wildly off topic for your blog/post, then just delete it.

People spam the weirdest things.

Here is the message I got, it does look spammy, doesn’t it? with that url about replicas of Rolexs… Maybe she suspects I’m a nice helpful person who might fall for this. Any road, any one who can’t figure out for themselves that WP does indeed use WYSIWYG doesn’t belong around here…

replicarolexsale.co.uk/products_new.html
[email protected]
213.5.69.106
Submitted on 2011/06/16 at 2:35 pm

Hello this is kinda of off topic but I was wondering if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding experience so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

See this part:

replicarolexsale.co.uk/products_new.html

SPAM.

Kill it.

I relate to you, I′ve also gotten all kinds of wierd spam. On my site, for some reason the same phrase (smileys included) was spammed over and over on all off my different posts but every time the poster hade a different ip and the site which the spam linked to was also always different. I don′t get these spammers. Anyways, I solved it by blocking a certain unusual word used in that phrase, so that′s a way of getting around that certain obstacle.

I use Akismet, Cookies for Comments, and Bad Behavior. Pretty much catches it all.

I use Akismet, but I’ve never heard of the others. Will implement them directly! Maybe they will let me block more than one word, e.g. “sales” or “products”.

True and funny story. I blocked the word ‘sex’ for a while, cause people were posting a lot of spam with it. Then there was a post where folks started discussing how sexy something was. And EVERYONE’S post was moderated.

Lesson learned? Don’t use ‘real’ words people use in normal conversations in your mod filters!

I use Akismet, Bad Behavior, Cookies For Comments and since a few weeks Conditional Captcha. De latter comes up with a captcha image only when Akismet says a comment is spam. The combination of these two have granted me empty spam queues for the last few weeks and thousands and thousands of discarded spam. And yes, I got the WYSIWYG question too.
Tip, if you wonder if s comment is really a comment, just Google it. If the exact text is found on thousands of websites, you’re pretty sure it’s spam.

IMO, I refuse to use Captcha.

My grandmother (who reads my sites and sometimes comments on it) cannot read them due to her glaucoma. After talking to some of my visually disabled friends, I found out how totally unfriendly they were to anyone who isn’t ‘normal’ sighted, and dumped ’em all. Even the plain text ones.

Also – Most captchas are hacked anyway. Reduce overhead, don’t use ’em ??

Personally I HATE Captchas!! I have weak eyes myself. And I can only imagine what trouble these puzzle things must be for someone whose eyes are worse than mine… They are just a nuisance anyway. I lost visitors back in the days when I tried to use certain well-known other blog systems which featured the notorious (and built-in) Captchas. They may have had normal eyesight but still complained they couldn’t read ’em and so, couldn’t get in to merely comment on my posting.

That’s what I say CONDITIONAL Captcha. Only when Akismet says a comment is spam, then a Captcha image appears. I can only say, the plugin works perfectly. I used to have a few hundred spam comments to delete from several websites each day, now I have none and normal people can comment without the captcha.

Yes, spam. The phrase “this is kinda of off topic” is a pretty big clue as well.

I am with everyone else about the Captchas. I hate them. They are difficult, even for someone with perfectly good vision. And the audible ones I’ve tried to listen to are so obscured that I couldn’t understand them– so much for an ‘accessible’ alternative. And they are not that secure. PHP + Image Magic + Tesseract will get you a long way towards cracking them. Financial motivation to crack them will get you the rest of the way.

I hate them too, but I hate spam more, so I’m very happy to have ran into a plugin that only presents a captcha image to spammers and not to normal visitors.

I’m getting about 3k spam a day on my one site so I gave up on false positives. No doubt I lose a few legit comments a day but I just can’t commit any more time dealing with that problem. I solely rely on akismet to determine what makes it in.

I hate them too, but I hate spam more, so I’m very happy to have ran into a plugin that only presents a captcha image to spammers and not to normal visitors.

What is the plugin and how does it make that decision?

That most Captchas have been cracked makes this a bit of a moot point though.