Spam, spam, and spam.
posted by gchatz 6 commentsIn this article:
Last time I checked spam meant robots. Stupid little applications from brilliant people gone the wrong way. That was the last time I checked and it was a long time ago. Lately spam is generated by Oompa Loompas with enough intelligence to override captchas and all that jazz. Below is the log of my attempts to limit spam on this blog.
Desperate try 1: Trickery
I wanted to avoid captchas because I hate them. So I did some research and discovered some seemingly nice tricks to avoid spam. Hidden fields, randomized field names, timestamps, md5s you name it. The Oompa Loompas started spamming immediately and half a day later the spam bots followed.
Desperate try 2: Captchas
Recaptha is king , right? Help your blog and the world on top. Did it work? No. The Oompa Loompas started spamming immediately. They were filling the captcha fields with the valid words (mostly ips from China).
So far so good: Akismet
Rakismet is a nice plugin for rails, that uses the Akismet service. It’s very easily configurable and you can run it against all your comments to filter out spam in an automated way. You can also support feedback to the Akismet service by using the ham! and spam! methods.
The (sad) stats
This blog-my mom and other relatives are forced to read- has 100 visitors / day in the best case (200 pageviews/day), so it’s not exactly popular. Yet it still accepts some 5k spam attempts per day (luckily akismet will only let one or two slip through). I wouldn’t be surprised if a stat came out stating some 50% of todays internet activity is spamming and even the big players are having a hard time fighting it
Comments (6)
Why you don't add a rel="nofollow" attribute to all links in the comments? That would make it less interesting for spammer to post comments on this blog.
Venlix, by making all comment links nofollow you penalize honest commentors who put a valid link to their websites. Its like a small thank you by the blog owner for posting a relevant comment to their post. A nofollow blog is far less commented on because most people who leave genuine comments are other bloggers who like to get a link to their own blog. Its all a part of blogging and the whole social structure built around it.
Spammers are generally lazy and stupid creatures and tend to try and place a load of links in each comment they post, which is easily filtered out by askimet (or raskimet if you're using rails) so is very effective at stopping it happening.
Anyway, good post and it does need saying!
I don't think you penalize people by adding a nofollow attribute for all of the comments on the website. I think it will improve the overall quality of all the posts. By leaving the links as a dofollow, people are making a comment just to steal the PR that you've earned on your website. If people find your link informational or useful, they will still view your website and check out what you're offering // read your blog. All of the anti-spam verifications in the world isn't going to stop a determined spammer.
Spam = Delete very simple
Thank you for your topic
The subject of bitter, sweet, beautiful, moon
Accept traffic
Gisele thanks from me to you
Mra thanks
To the meeting ..
did some research Thank you for your topic
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