Keeping your blog safe from comment SPAM…

The first and last items are all you need. The second item you talk about is basically a captcha, and captcha’s do not work. They prevent more real people from commenting than they do spammers.

Example:
-People who are unable to see your image (handicapped people using screen readers).
-People who are unable to read English well enough to understand what you want them to do.
-People who hate having to jump through your hoops and will simply not bother trying (I include myself in this group, which is why I’m commenting here and not on your blog).

When I see a captcha on somebody’s blog, I leave. If it’s particularly obnoxious, I block their URL as well.

Also, captcha’s don’t stop spam at all. Why? a) automated spam sending systems can read something like 85% of them anyway and b) spammers don’t use comment forms anymore. They use pingbacks/trackbacks.

Captcha’s are counterproductive and evil. Thumbs down to you for including them as a legitimate method of spam blocking.

Spamming the forums also isn’t that good of an idea. ??

Another issue with Capcha’s are those behind broken proxies like Comcast users. They’ll only see the first image and nothing after that, even with a forced reload.

Otto, wow you read quick!

Sorry you don’t agree but I think that “Captcha” are still worthwhile. This is why I like Peter’s plugin, it’s simple, it’s clear and you can choose whatever words you like.

And I humbly disagree with you about spammers not using comment forms… ??

It does look as though Hashcash, has some real possibilites. I will be looking into in the future, perhaps programs like this will be the future, I don’t know.

Sorry I got a thumbs down from you, but I’ll give you a thumbs for replying and adding to the discussion, even if it’s here! ??

For what it’s worth.

Joe

About spamming, this forum, I certainly did not intend to, if indeed, I did, I meant to post in YOUR WORDPRESS forum. Which, I have now…

Admins, please feel free to freeze or remove this from here.

Apologies.

Since this one had discussion, I closed the other dupe and moved this to “Your WordPress”.

pisanojm: He meant by posting multiple times. But no harm, no foul. ??

And drmike is right, I had not considered that issue. Users behind proxies (like myself, when I’m at work) can have issues with captchas. Things like HashCash and those stupid math trick plugins are equally obnoxious and annoying. They’re also easily defeated.

The short of it is that captchas don’t work. This is not a matter of opinion. It’s proven. There are research papers and studies that have been done on the subject.

And I humbly disagree with you about spammers not using comment forms…

Also proven. Or, at least, statistically proven. Out of those 1 billion spams blocked by Akismet, I would be surprised if more than, say, 5% of them were comments instead of pingbacks/trackbacks.

And for what it’s worth, I’ve *never* had a spam come in via the comment form. Admittedly, I’ve only got maybe 10,000 or so, so it’s not a large enough sample to really say with any certainty. I have had a few false spam detections that came in via the comment form, mind you.

Otto,

I guess what I would really like to see is some hard statistics about spammers not using comment forms to post. With Bad Behavior, and Akismet engaged I used to recieve about 30-50 marked spam comments per day. Since installing peter’s plugin, I have received maybe one or two per day in my Spam Box. With giants like DIGG and others still asking if “we’re human”, I have to believe this kind of captcha still works.

Now certainly, I haven’t run any kind of statistical analysis on this, but the ancedoctal evidence appears to me that it is indeed working, at least on my blog.

Granted, I’ve only been using Peter’s plugin for about a week, user’s are still able to comment and are commenting. Now, that being said, although, I haven’t had any trackbacks lately, so I’m not sure that even though I changed the code to allow for trackbacks, It may be blocking that as well. I’ll know in a few more days.

I think that the HASHCASH plugin, looks pretty good. I am going to leave things as they are on my web log and try it out in some of my sandboxes. The idea of creating a delay to the spammers, looks pretty tempting to me!

Joe

Granted, I’ve only been using Peter’s plugin for about a week, user’s are still able to comment and are commenting.

What’s the variation? I mean, if you were only getting 2 or 3 comments per day before and are getting the same now, that doesn’t say much. But if you were getting 30-40 per day and that’s dropped to 10-20 per day, then that’s a big deal.

All evidence shows that captcha’s don’t slow spam one little bit but that they do stop users from commenting. In many cases they stop users from even *attempting* to comment. The fact that you can still get comments tells you nothing. And the fact remains that *I* won’t be posting on your site as long as there’s some kind of BS nonsense hoop that you want me to jump through to do it. While I am only one person, I’m not the only one who feels and acts that way (though I may be one of the few to state it outright in such terms ?? ).

You want your users to comment. Anything that makes it more difficult for them to do so or which has the effect of discouraging them from doing so, by any amount, is bad.

Digg doesn’t have captcha’s for commenting, BTW. No major site does. They make use them for new user registrations because they’re more specific targets, but they are not using them to fight spam. Digg, in particular, is trying to prevent fake account creation via automated systems that could then be used to game the digg system.

I just noticed this on Lorelle’s blog:
https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/battling-comment-spam-human-versus-human/

Some comment spammers are/have developed systems that use cheap labor to type in captcha text in order to mass post their spam.

Also proven. Or, at least, statistically proven. Out of those 1 billion spams blocked by Akismet, I would be surprised if more than, say, 5% of them were comments instead of pingbacks/trackbacks.

It might be: however, about 85% of my blocked spam comes from spambots, I get very few pingback/trackbacks from spammers although there have been a few. I’d agree on the captcha issue… I just find captcha incredibly annoying.

Captcha helps dramatically to limit the amount of spam, but I would say that askimet plugin has worked the best for me at my blog, as for captcha’s not working I find this hard to believe.

One fairly simple way to block comment spam is just to change the comment form system a little. Get people to put their URLs in the main comment box and take the URL field out of your form (but leave it in the script). Any comment with the URL field filled in has therefore not been done through the comment form, but by a script. Coming up with a little bit of script to automatically delete these is no problem (I get a lot of Christian dating websites, for some reason, very odd).
Its such a simple way that I actually feel a bit embarrassed for suggesting it, but it works. The downside is that you lose the URL field in comments, but you can either make a different one with a different name or include it in Name or Comment fields. And of course it only works where spambots leave a URL, but…they usually do, since that’s kind of the whole point.

Looking for moi! I blog including at: joechristian.blogstream.com

and I saw a listing for borrowed materials from moi that referenced: WordPress

So being the curious sort, I came looking to see what materials… free to all as long as I get credited… that was here, and I broke in this stream of thought/conversation here and waned to tell you why I am here and what I am doing! But I am now a member as well!

Joe Christian, your average pilgrim and mystic off the street! <><