Defeating Comment Spam

  • Hi,
    My blog seems to recently have become a serious victim of comment spam. WordPress has caught almost all of it, but it’s taking a lot of time to delete all the moderation request e-mails and the actual comments themselves.
    I’d like to explore how comment spammers are able to do their thing. How do they identify how to submit comments in an automated way? Do they look for certain field names in forms? Would it confuse them if each WordPress installation had a different random field name for comment submissions?
    Are there options for making the moderation interface more friendly? Perhaps a “delete all of these” button? Or batching the moderation e-mails into one per day, with a link to “delete all of these”?
    Thanks!
    — John

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • John,
    You could use Kitten’s Spam Tools – https://mookitty.co.uk/devblog/ as well as others that are available as simple plugins. Search the forums for “spam tools” and you’ll quickly find them all. Dougal’s Spam Tar Pit is a nice one and LaughingLizard just came out with a new one recently.
    There is a LOT of discussion going on regarding spam-killing in the hackers’ mailing list right now. You can count on the devs and all of the other coders working their fannies off to bring in better tools for managing the spambots.

    I use the BlackList comment spam filter, and the AutoClose Comments plugins to catch any potential spam.
    I like the Blacklist. Only twice did it falsely flagged comments as spam, and only once did it let some spam through. I noticed that all of the spam comments I was getting were on old posts, so I also added the AutoClose Comments p/i. Now, any post older than 21 days gets closed to comments. No more spam here.
    TG

    webmasterworld.com is an excellent site for finding out how to stay ahead of spam

    monitor how movable type blogs deal with comment spam.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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