Those dirty spammers are getting too smart. Even with excellent tools such as Akismet, keeping that junk at bay is a constant battle. The latest tactic I’m seeing (which Akismet will not catch) is the one-word comment such as “cool”, “interesting” or “nice”. None of these words could be justifiably added to a blacklist, so how does one combat it?
Spamming is an enterprise I’ve never understood. Do these people actually get clicks and make money? I realize we live in an ad-driven society… junk mail, television and radio commercials are all widely accepted. So why is spam is so loathsome? Because it’s utterly unavoidable.
With TV or radio you can walk away, switch the station or turn them off any time. Telemarketing is annoying but can always hang up (or don’t answer the phone in the first place). Spam gives you no such options. If you want to preserve the integrity of your site, you have to deal with it.
So other than moderating ALL comments, what’s a blogger to do? In addition to Akismet, here are a few highly effective plugins designed to guard against comment spam:
- Moderate Brief Comments – automatically puts into moderation very short and/or one word remarks
- WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam – eliminate automated trackbacks and pingbacks
- Bad Behavior – block link spam generated by robots
Have you experienced success with a particular plugin? By all means, add it here and ease someone’s pain! ;)
6/12/2007
This is definitely a side of blogging that us readers don’t get to see. And I think you’re right about spam being so annoying because you don’t have much of a choice. You can just delete it, but that still takes up time!
6/12/2007
I am having the opposite problem these days, a guy’s comments keep on being marked as spam even if he writes constructive comments.
6/12/2007
Mirko, is it possible to add a specific user (by name, email or website) to a “Safe” list? Email would probably be best, since it’s not published.
6/12/2007
@ Mirko – that has happened to me a few times too. I couldn’t find a good explanation for it either… none of the comments contained multiple links, or blacklisted words, or known spamming domains. Funny thing is, twice it happened where the person tried posting a second comment that went through when the first didn’t. How’s that for a head-scratcher? :)
@LaurenMarie – a good idea. Wouldn’t it be great if Wordpress could include that functionality in a future update?
6/13/2007
I use to get a bit of spam before I installed the Akismet plugin and it was a pain to clear it all off. Hope things get better for you. ^_^
6/13/2007
Thanks Daniel. :) I wonder if these people have lists they track. Then when they find a blogger who doesn’t respond immediately to their junk comments immediately, they tell all their friends to come and post too! LOL
7/10/2007
But like email spam, it must work somewhere or else they would stop doing it. I wonder what those spammers think. An interview with one would sure be interesting…
7/10/2007
@LaurenMarie – funny you should mention that. A few years ago I worked for a company with a very colorful client who was involved in “email marketing”, but everyone in the office knew he was a spammer. The guy even had a lawyer helping him with wording and finding loopholes so he wouldn’t get busted. He told me at one point his response rate was around 3%. I was surprised it was even that high, but then again it seems like a lot of hassle for such a small figure (comparatively speaking).
8/23/2007
It’s true, spammers are getting smarter. They don’t send spam with many links on a comment now, instead they send a pingback and add one or two links to a keyword which relate to the post. I think there must be new software to auto comment certain posts. Akismet will not catch this. My Akismet has caught only 226 spam attempts this month but before it was usually more than 2000.