The preemptive measures I took were things like a simple blacklist of keywords that were almost definitely spam and moderating comments that contain three or more links. Evidently that was failing as well, so I began searching for a plugin.
Recently I found that Michael Heilemann uses Akismet as his comment spam plugin. According to him, it is his first-ever comment spam plugin and works like a charm. That’s a good enough testimony for me. I proceeded to download it, only to discover that I needed a Wordpress “API key.” What the?
It turns out, in order to use Akismet, you have to register for a blog at Wordpress.com. How do you do that? There’s no “register here” place or anything. I typed my email in the invite box and received an invitation a few hours later. That gave me the ability to register. Man, all that just to register. Good grief!
Anyway, so if you’re wondering how to get an API key, you have to get invited to Wordpress.com and sign up there, then go to your profile and copy the API key. The Akismet plugin works absolutely beautifully and has thus far caught 8 spam comments (all of which were indeed spam, by the way). I only installed it yesterday. Thanks, Akismet!
Spam sucks dude, my gmail account basically is just a spam account. I have 6000+ emails in my spam folder.
November 17th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
I know the feeling Jona. Tell me how that plug-in works. I keep my spam list current, even with common typos. Between that and the “any link in a post gets moderated” it’s all working well for me. If only they could Resist the Urge. By the way, in the post I just linked to above, one of my readers recommended the exact plugin you’re testing. :)
November 17th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Spam is painful. I used to get bucket-loads of it, but I have been using a free open-source “Bayesian” spam filter called PopFile which works very well. It takes a month or so to “teach” it what spam looks like, but after that it is VERY accurate, with hardly any false-negatives. I’ve been running it for about a year, and nowadays I get a wrongly classified mail thrown into my spam folder about once a month. Small price to pay, considering I get about 30 - 40 spams a day.
Cheers,
Paul
November 17th, 2005 at 7:57 pm
Ryan, I’m talking about comment spam, not email spam. ;)
Mike, thus far the plugin has worked excellently! I haven’t had a spam email since I installed it (well I have, but the ones that I’ve had were caught by Akismet). So far there’ve been no false-negatives, either.
Paul, thanks very much for the tip! Akismet appears to be functioning exceptionally for me right now, but if it doesn’t work out, I will definitely consider your suggestion. Thanks again!
November 17th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
This may be of interest…
[…]another serious contender in the fight against comment spammers from some Unknown Genius which is called Spam Karma[…]
November 17th, 2005 at 10:15 pm
Dude, I’m not stupid….. I was just relating to spam as a whole.
November 17th, 2005 at 11:03 pm
Have an image show that the user would need to verify that they are not a spammer. Like banks do!
November 18th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
Eww, you mean a CAPTCHA? Those are simply too ugly. :P
November 18th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
CAPTCHA is also inaccessible.
November 19th, 2005 at 11:56 am