We’re having increasing comment spam problems on Particletree and it looks like the trickery revolves around the following four exclamations:
Good design!
Well done!
Great work!
Nice site!
To keep us from going crazy over it, we’ve gone ahead and blacklisted the phrases and hope that takes care of things for awhile. If you need to use any of the combinations above, try to do it without an exclamation mark.
Me too, much more frequently than they’ve been coming before. I hadn’t thought about banning those phrases though - good idea!
For what it’s worth, Akismet catches all of these kinds of spam for me without a hitch. Must be the magic.
Maybe it’s time for a member-system for comments?
It’s manual approval right now Mislav. I think a member-system might be the way to go because good to spam comment ratio is about 1-100 right now.
Aksimet needs a wp key, and I haven’t found a way on the wp site to get one beside signing up for a weblong on wordpress.com.
I use Spam Karma 2 to kerb my spam. Works great, and it can be a ‘major beeotch’ if you want to open up a can of whoopass on spammers. Plus it has captcha for humans if they fail the turing test
If your wander over to Akismet and have a look at their stats you will see a huge spike in spam in the past few days.
I though 100 comment spam about hotels in two days was a bit much, but other people where getting 10,000 or more spam comments in that period
I’ve implemented a CAPTCHA-style “Spam/RoboCop” on my blog. It has effectively eliminated all spam messages since it was introduced on 2 months ago. To avoid having the user type in a code or some such thing, I ask them to compare select one of four images that is the same as a random reference image. In this case I chose images of Dirty Harry, Miami Vice and Starsky & Hutch. But of course it could be anything. :-D Feel free to try it out on this post. The blog is in Danish, but you should be able to guess what to do anyway.
For accessibility and simplicity reasons, I don’t approve CAPTCHAs or image comparison techniques.
There are other (not equally) good methods:
Manual approval with whitelisting - once a user’s comment is approved, subsequent comments from the same users skip approval process Empty INPUT element, styled “display:none” with a label “don’t fill out this field” (for blind users) Forced comment preview as seen on dean.edwards.name Blacklisting spam patterns (as the original post demonstrates) - spam usually doesn’t take so many forms
I’ve found requiring JavaScript for comments has drastically reduced comment spam for me. I’ve only had one in the past several weeks (and I’m sure it was somebody doing it manually). It seems to have totally cut out bots. And if you want to still allow comments for users without JavaScript, you could add a CAPTCHA for these users.
asdffasd asdfa asdfasfasfasdasdfas asdfasdf
Everyone needs a hug.
I was getting hit hard too just out of now where. So annoying! Had problems implementing Akemis too, I am using Bad Behavior. It took a bit to learn the spam habits, but after two weeks spam no more!
Good luck!
Everyone needs a hug.?????????????? Why????? I thouhgt there are a lot of “cool” boys here gg