Be bold, but not too bold
Someone’s testing my blog recently, trying by hand to get comments through my spam blockers. They’re trying by hand because automated attempts are blocked and the server simply doesn’t respond. Hand-submitting spam doesn’t scale, so only a few have popped up on my admin screen.
Have fun, I.P. addresses 173.213.212.234 and 219.91.208.244 (remember the Internet isn’t anonymous). If you look around this blog you won’t notice any spam comments. There’s a reason for that — a combination of reasons, actually. You’re unlikely to defeat the measures I’ve put in place, unless you try things that most people would consider hacking. And if you do that, be prepared for the consequences.
Of course, if you’re actually trying to leave a comment, just do it. All appropriate comments are approved, although sometimes it takes me a few hours to moderate them.
I run a few WordPress blogs and have the same comment spam issue though found bad behavior along with Akismet kills most of the comment spam, to the extent that I removed the math comment capcha. I also have problems with people trying to login to the system through the admin panel and ‘limit logins’ seems to be catching and blacklisting them.
Dylan
8 Oct 12 at 12:11 pm
Akismet + Bad Behaviour isn’t enough for my blog. Besides, after a while I decided that it’s better to moderate comments than to have to remove spam after it gets onto the site. Spammers can generate a lot of noise in a short time, so I force everyone to be moderated until I’ve approved a comment from them before.
I have my admin username changed to something different. It’s no more secure than standard WordPress, but having a slightly smaller surface area helps discourage people who are just looking for the really easy targets.
It must be hard for you to post comments on others’ blogs. Given that you link to an SEO firm, I imagine you get deleted as spam a lot of the time. Akismet thought your comment was spam!
Xaprb
8 Oct 12 at 3:06 pm
I’m disabling the captcha. Let’s see what happens — if it was blocking a lot of spam I’ll get a huge moderation queue real fast :-) A couple users complained about it, so if I don’t need it this will be good.
Xaprb
8 Oct 12 at 3:09 pm
Instant spam flood :-)
Xaprb
8 Oct 12 at 3:31 pm