Hurray — finally fixed

Main main concern about Akismet is while it is catching so much spam, it can and does grab good comments as well — a long standing issue I’ve had when commenting in particular. Because site owners often seem to let it grab everything, rather than doing stuff like CAPTCHAs, I think that still leaves it vulnerable to the admittedly small amount of good stuff getting buried in the spam.

CAPTCHAs break usability. In the quest to end spam, we cannot and should not ever resort to challenges like CAPTCHAs and “reply if you’re not spam” e-mails. They frustrate users and discourage participation while being no more effective than a good collaborative reporting system like Akismet.

When I run a mail server with Spam Assassin, I end up with a very low rate of false-positives and false-negatives without making users jump through hoops. Google’s spam filtering is even more effective without making users do the hokey pokey in reverse or something equally as inane.

Spam is inconvenient and can take a lot of work to defeat, but CAPTCHAs are a solution worse than the problem.

If anyone is interested in the plugin Mike alluded to it’s available on our new plugin directory here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....old-posts/

Hi,

You might want to try my plugin it requires no captchas and we haven’t had a single spam comment on our site. Try it out:-
http://www.thespanner.co.uk/2007/02/12/spambam/

Cheers

I don’t get anywhere near as many as you do, but I certainly get a lot. We need to encourage search engines like Google to set up a way where we can forward them unwanted spam comments, and if they get a certain number of them they will blacklist the domain that the spammers are hoping to increase the page rank for.

I get 400-500 every day, and I don’t get a fraction of even that number of visitors. I wish their was something to be done. It seems like a societal problem more than anything else. Those people responsible aren’t concerned about anyone other than them selfs and the money they are making. And societal problems are much harder to fix than computer problems.

Oh my god, this is really many spam. On my site i get 50-100 spam comments or trackbacks. But, Akismet works fine.

Can I interest anyone here in some v.1.a.g.ra? Just checking… you never know.

I think the amount of spam just depends on how big the site is. I used to get at 50 a day one blog and then around 10 on another but 15,000 a day is really big.

I couldn’t have comments on my blog without it.
Thanks Akismet!

we get a whopping 50 spam comments a day!

Am I the only one lamenting the two week timeout? I kind of like how some unique or especially illuminating old blog posts continue to live their own life in the comments and on Google. That’s part of the internet and blog magic for me, to see things take on their own life, and morph, and spawn new ideas and discussions that weren’t intended.

The old blog post about “post secret” that You (TechCrunch) linked to a few weeks back - don’t you regret missing out on that kind of continous commenting over the years?

Even if it doesn’t happen all too often, you must have at something like 10-100 blogposts that continue to get well deserved traffic through google long after their debut and among those, there must be some legitimate continuing of some kind of discussion?

Bad Behaviour is another comment-spam filtering tool that can prevent a site from being accessed at the IP level.

I understand the author worked on Akismet in the early days.

As an able bodied user, I have no problem with Captcha. I think claims to the contrary are overreaching, perhaps exageration by advocates for the disabled.

I guess my curiousity is how many anonymous comments does TechCrunch receive, and what does it consider anonymous?

I think my comments seem to get sucked up by Akismet I guess, I posted a comment about the BBC article from last week but it never showed up.

Who knows if this comment will show up either!

Rename wp-comments-post.php to something else.

Create a blank wp-comments-post.php file (just so that the spammers still get a 200 HTTP status code)

Edit the “comments” page in template:
Leave the “action” attribute pointing to the default wp-comments-post.php page. Add some Javascript to the FORM tag’s “onSubmit” method. Something like:

onsubmit=”this.action=’location-of-new-wp-comments-post.php’; return true;”

Anyone with Javascript enabled (nearly 100%) will be able to post comments but the spam bots (which do not parse Javascript) will not.

You can even obfuscate the Javascript code further by throwing in some random concatenation…

onsubmit=”this.action=’location’ + ‘-of-new-wp-comments-post.’ + ‘php’; return true;”

… or setting the URL in a variable and referencing the variable instead.

Apologies if I’ve missed it (I can only see two green “boxes” above from the author, and I can’t see it there), but what IS the recommended WordPress plug-in?