Drowning in Spam

Spam is the worst thing ever invented by man. It is completely useless and wastes my time. Nobody wastes my time except me. At least thermonuclear weapons may someday be used to blow up a planet-annihilating meteor heading our way like in Armageddon.

Before Akismet was added to WordPress as a default plugin, I manually moderated all comments. Those were the days when I was lucky to get a single comment for any post. After that Akismet took over and it worked fine for a while. I would still go through all the spam comments to check for false positives but at least Akismet ensured that comments from trusted sources (well, most of them anyway) appeared immediately without having to wait for my moderation.

Spam
Staring into the face of evil

Well, recently the increasing spam volume has made it impossible for me to check through them for valid comments. I’ve been getting nearly 1000 spam comments a day and I’m very, very certain that some of your comments have been eaten up by Akismet as false positives in the process.

So I have finally implemented an image verification system for commenting. I hate image verification systems, especially since half the time I can’t tell apart a capital “i” from a lower case “L”. But it’s the lesser of the many evils. An e-mail verification system is even more annoying, Akismet eats comments like Cookie Monster eats cookies and a forced registration policy will just turn lazy people like me off.

Security Code

The good thing is that if you register an account and remain logged in, you won’t have to enter a security code when commenting. Hurray!

Oh well, hopefully this is enough to stop the spamage. Please tell me if you find any bugs with the verification system.

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

38 Responses to Drowning in Spam

  1. DM says:

    Let’s see if this works… testing, testing.

  2. Guncannon says:

    Testing, testing.

  3. Crest says:

    We need something nice to make this system work well…. how about… you know… boobies!

  4. JS says:

    Test, test…..

  5. DrmChsr0 says:

    LAWL

    SPAM SPAM LOL

  6. jinyamato says:

    test test

  7. TedFox says:

    I think bad behavior would help a lot as well. I prefer it a lot more compared to capchas…

  8. Tiny Red Man says:

    man, this site is turning more and more like dannychoo.com …so wat’s next? mascot?

  9. Skane says:

    Those had to be some of the BIGGEST fonts I have had ever seen for a registration page. ^^; I kid you not when I say I could have signed up without wearing my spectacles. ^^;

    Cheers.

  10. Zer0 says:

    pruning spam takes up most of my time. its a never ending hack and slash game, like vines that regenerate itself. after a while, the habit becomes addictive.

    nothing less than a scorched earth policy against spammers

    one day, you’ll feel that something is amiss when there’s no spam to clear.

  11. alafista says:

    let me help u to test .. haha

  12. TehShaw says:

    That sucks : /
    Though…I usually get 500+ spam-mails a month to my gmail : /

  13. Ronin says:

    Well, it works fine from this end. :)

  14. scottfrye says:

    Which version of WordPress you using?

    Because when I upgraded to 2.1 it had a newer version of askimet and it seemed to decrease the number of spam for me. Also I think I’ve got Spam Karma 2 installed as well and I’ve got the severity set to ‘Kinda Mean.’

    Not sure if those help but just doing the security code will help decrease the amount of spam you are getting.

  15. ZmmCool says:

    Registered & logged in ~

    [Quote]
    Singapore Skane
    March 2nd, 2007 at 11:47 pm

    Those had to be some of the BIGGEST fonts I have had ever seen for a registration page. ^^;
    [/quote]

    +1
    XD

  16. Deranged says:

    Yikes, that is a huge amount of spam… can understand the need for the new system… and its really not that much different from the normal experience really…

  17. Soulshift says:

    You do realize that even moderately advanced spambots are going to have the capability to OCR your security image and get through the barrier. I’m curious as to how much actual spam reduction you’re seeing after implementing the CAPTCHA, and whether you’d consider using a more obfuscated image.

  18. ZergBrooding says:

    How does the system recognize spam from posts?

  19. Kurogane says:

    Use Spam Karma 2 with Akismet plugin. SK2’s probably the best anti-spam plugin out there yet and it’s done wonders for my blog. I think in all in all, it only failed me about 10-20 times.

    Also, I guess I’ll register a User Level 1 account too.

  20. shiachan says:

    lets hope it works

  21. Cyclops says:

    Test. Test. Testing… Testing 1, 2, 3….

    Here is a question – are you doing this image verification alongside the the Akismet spam filter? So that you can still catch the manual spams?

  22. Rakugakid says:

    Is this security code thing permanent?? Coz this things always piss me off T.T

  23. Kazu says:

    hey!now I’m registered >_

  24. CHICKEN says:

    well lol

  25. exaltdragon says:

    Question: What if the spamming is done by a human who can enter the security code anyway?

    anyway, 1000 spams per day is scarry….I didn’t even get 100 spams on my old forum…

  26. exalt dragon says:

    It works ^_^

  27. Burrowowl says:

    I’m pretty sure that Akismet does something to amplify or exaggerate the quantity of spam it reports. When I was just using MT-Blacklist, I used to get a couple dozen spams trapped per day. When I switched to WordPress and used WP Hashcash, maybe four spams would leak through per week (Hashcash didn’t report how many were failing). Since installing Akismet a couple months ago, it claims to have stopped around 30,000 spams. Nonsense.

    Oh, and CAPTCHAs are horrible. Bad, bad, bad, bad.

  28. TheBigN says:

    Ooh… All numbers….

    Well, good luck with this. :3

  29. Koji Oe says:

    That is a lot of spam.

  30. AK says:

    Cool. Now everybody’s spamming with the security code.

  31. Tsubaki says:

    This is added hassle to your commenters.

  32. animeking says:

    Well,let us hope this new system well decrease the amount of spam.

  33. tj han says:

    I have the exact same problem. Was going to do a post about it but you beat me to it. Ok I shall do the same thing. Btw do you turn off Akismet now?

  34. Santa says:

    Commencing test…

    If you can read this that means it has succeeded in penetrating your final line of defence, therefore implying failure, as I have nothing important to say:P.

  35. Azu says:

    SPAMTEST

    .-.

  36. Hey dude, try using Hashcash, I was using image-based verification on my blog and still spammers got through, after implementing Hashcash I had 0 spam!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *