Musings of a Software Engineer » Spam

Spam filters

adam — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:04:45 +0000

After implementing a spam filter on my blogs a few months ago in an attempt to stop the spam comments, it seems to have worked really well in stopping all comments from everyone. The idea of the first plugin was it asked a simple maths question of the user to ensure its a person rather than a human being. I’m pretty sure that it was working ok, but we got an email the other day saying they couldnt post on the blog. So after a quick check (I’m not sure what happened) but the plugin was no longer working as I would have expected. The only thing that I can think of is that an update on wordpress itself caused it too stop working.

After a few searches on the wordpress plugin site I found a new comment spam protector and installed that and it was really simple to get it up and running. Unfortunately for some reason when this was added to the comments forms they were put in an odd place, underneath the submit button.

So the simple install turned into updating all of the themes that I was using to ensure that it was being placed above the submit button. I also did a quick hack on the php to remove the label that was being displayed.

Spam comments

adam — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:37:44 +0000

Spam

After upgrading to the latest version of WPMU, I had a look around to see where there was a way of stopping spam comments since I was forever trying to delete them. Doing a quick search on wordpress.com (why didnt I do this eariler) there are a number of plugins available that force the user either to a) answer a simple maths question or b) creates an image that the user has to enter.

I’ve not had the maths plugin running for the last month or so and on all the blogs I’ve so far had no spam comments which is fantastic. Means that I dont need to keep deleting things every couple of days!!

Spam

adam — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:29:45 +0000

Spam, can it get any worse?

Wow its amazing how time has flown by over the last couple of weeks, it does not seem that long ago that I was writing about ringtones. Its been a busy couple of weeks due to one thing and another and I’ve not had chance to get back to the blog to write anything. So I decided to make an effort today to write about anniversaries of products.

So I went through the usual of logon to the wordpress admin and was just about to press the Add New post button when I noticed the number of comments in the pending state, 68 to be precise. Now since I have the approval stuff turned on wouldnt you think it was a complete waste of time sending strange spam comments!

Maybe I’ve missed a trick somewhere but since I just do a batch delete all of spam messages no-one ever sees them. The people who do the spamming must know that they are not getting posted as comments, so why bother. Its a really shame that the internet has gotten itself into this strange state, I’m sure I read a fact about email that 90% of it was spam or some silly number like that. I wonder what the percentage of blog comments are spam? Maybe some researcher can have a look into this.

Its something we just have to live with and cannot get any worse…… can it?