[15 January 2008]
This morning I was a bit surprised to see nineteen comments on various blog posts waiting for moderation here. I hadn’t realized that such a queue had been built up since Friday, or that so many new people had discovered this blog and wanted to comment.
My slight flush of self-congratulation at the success of the blog lasted only a few moments, as long as it took to notice that of the nineteen comments eighteen were clearly spam, and the nineteenth is almost certainly spam (I’m going to sleep on that one).
Dealing with persistent spam attacks could take a lot of the pleasure out of maintaining a blog, just as dealing with spam made email an unbearable drain on my time before I started my white list. Time to spend some time investigating the blog-spam control tools available to me.
I found defensio to be quite effective when I was using WordPress. It also sorts by spaminess, so it’s easier to spot false positives.
http://defensio.com
I’ve been using the wordpress plugin spamkarma2 with a lot of success on my blog:
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
I think the de facto standard with WordPress is now askimet, which is probably already installed on your wordpress set up as well.
http://disqus.com/ works for me. I’m led to believe their spam filtering is quite good.
I’ve had exactly the same experience, and at times add-comment.cgi has been the most requested URL on my server. I found that simple use of the observation that spam bots don’t execute JavaScript makes it really easy to filter out 100% of the automated spam, without having to bother the users at all.
This article is also quite good: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html