For the last few months I've had nothing but problems with blog spammers. I have run a few various systems for keeping the spam in check, and most of them have been quite successful. Unfortunately, they require quite a lot of maintenance and updating, so I have changed the comment spam prevention system to use Akismet. So far, it has caught every spam posted to the site with no false positives - excellent.
What I found disturbing, though, was when I visited the Akismet site and took a look at their stats. Apparently "93% of all comments are spam" now, a far higher proportion than I had thought previously. On AddedBytes.com the figure is about 85%, and rising. So much for the search engines' promise to deal with the problem!
5 Comments
I just wrote up a quick class this weekend using the Zend Framework that allows you to easily interact with Akismet. My own website has waaaay more than 85% spam in the comments. Check it out if you're interested:
http://www.gregphoto.net/index.php/2006/06/11/akismet-and-the-zend-framework
#1, Greg, United States, 13 June 2006. Reply to this.
A few weeks ago, my rarely-visited (and rarely-updated) blog suddenly attracted a ton of spam, which Akismet has done a great job of filtering out. Apparently, my site "is very cognitive"!
#2, Barry Bloye, United Kingdom, 14 June 2006. Reply to this.
While everyone is praising the goodness of Akismet, many missed another excellent plugin called Bad Behavior. I believe Bad Behavior might be even better than Akismet in the sense that you totally block http access to spam bot using fingerprint such as agent etc. to identify them. No extra analysis step of comment content, which makes it even faster and saves you bandwidth dealing with spams.
#3, eyn, Canada, 14 June 2006. Reply to this.
I have 3 blogs I run, and they are bombarded with spam. I finally disabled comments unless the user has already had a previously approved comment.
#4, Web Developer, United States, 14 June 2006. Reply to this.
Spam Karma works well for me. And it doesnt require signing up for a wordpress.com account to get an API Key (like Askimet did the last time I used it).
#5, Tarun, India, 26 July 2006. Reply to this.