Comment Spam Filtering
Various rotting bastard spammers and their stupid spambots had recently discovered my weblog. In the last week, I have gone from one or two bits o’ comment spam a week to upwards of ten or so. As with all spam, I’m sure the trend will only be in the wrong direction.
Stupid asshats.
So, I have installed Spam Karma. We shall see. If you have any problems posting a comment (and aren’t a spammer :-), send me an email. (I long ago gave up hiding my email address).
Here is a business plan for someone:
Create a company that does nothing but create false business leads for the products advertised via spamming. Use offshore labor to ensure that “human element” is involved in the process.
Update: Wow. Just in time. 20+ spambot posts in less than an hour already today.
November 30th, 2005 at 11:10 pm
I hope this works well for you. I just turned off comments altogether, which I really didn’t want to do (nor did many of my friends who posted to my blog). I’ve been looking at WordPress and things like SpamKarma to re-enable that… so I figure I’ll watch here and see how you do.
-joe
November 30th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
Hey! Someone was able to comment. So that, at least, is a good sign. I really want to leave comments enabled because I learn a huge amount from interacting with folks via comments. Especially when I’m wrong.
November 30th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
Has your copy of Aperture arrived yet? I’m eager to hear about it here, though I’ve only heard good from previewers so far.
December 6th, 2005 at 10:36 am
More money could probably be made writing software to automatically read those wibbly 1970s-style words you have to type in when submitting forms, so that spambots can do it too.
Actually, I expect a Newton could already do it…
December 6th, 2005 at 5:07 pm
I had some issues with spambots in the past …
The trick is to use your own custom commenting mechanism (just a simple CGI) instead of the standard MT or Wordpress tuff, then require a comment password, ban all URIs from the comment body and strip all HTML. This way, I’ve *completely* eliminated all comment spam — the robots don’t know how to proceed.