Updated spam controls
I’m not using my previous combination of Bad Behaviour + WP-Gatekeeper anymore. I’ve removed them in favor of ordinary reCAPTCHA. Although it lets a lot of spammers through (almost a thousand spam comments in the day I’ve had it enabled) and Bad Behaviour let only 1 or 2 a month through, it became clear that a lot of people were getting blocked wrongly by Bad Behaviour.
This means that I can’t practically moderate the spam queue. If you submit a comment and it doesn’t get published, you either went into the spam queue that I ignore, or I decided to censor you ;-) Feel free to email me if you think anything’s wrong.
Akismet – http://akismet.com/ – is another option. I’m a bit biased though, I worked on the Akismet team for a few years and I don’t like CAPTCHAs.
Joseph Scott
19 Feb 13 at 12:33 am
Why are you not using Akismet? Works very well for me, any issue with that?
Best Regards,
Uli
Uli
19 Feb 13 at 5:38 am
FWIW, on dc.pm.org, we occasionally have spammers that add comments after entering a correct recaptcha. It does stop the common bots though.
Zak Zebrowski
19 Feb 13 at 9:34 am
I modified badbehavior to work for a personal project that I have, and I log the infractions. I noticed by far the biggest problem it was having was with regard to ip blacklists. Problem is that there are so many recycled IPs once used by spammers that it is polluting every one else. Many of the other checks work pretty good if you just hack it to remove the IP black list checks.
kenrick
19 Feb 13 at 7:27 pm
A lot of people have told me in the past that Akismet works well for them. I’m not sure if I’ve done something wrong or if I just get a lot more comment traffic on my blog, but using only Akismet I’ll get literally tens of thousands of spam comments per day, and a significant enough fraction of those Akismet won’t catch. I end up having several spam comments per minute with Akismet. I do try it occasionally — check the archives of this blog. I’ve periodically turned off everything except Akismet and very quickly turned it back on because it just can’t stop the flood.
Xaprb
21 Feb 13 at 4:47 pm
Next time you want to try Akismet feel free to drop a note to support@akismet.com. We can make sure the API calls look right, if for some reason it isn’t getting good data then it definitely won’t perform as well.
Akismet scans over 100M comments per day, so I don’t think the direct number of comments on your site is a related to any accuracy issues.
We want Akismet is to be as accurate as possible, which is why we allow users to submit missed spam items back to Akismet, for the system to learn from them.
Joseph Scott
21 Feb 13 at 5:57 pm
Thanks. I am using Akismet, there is just no way I can possibly review the amount of spam comments I get. As a result, my comment policy is this: a) all comments go into moderation unless the author already has a published comment b) Akismet filters the moderation queue c) I never review anything Akismet flags as spam. Some legitimate comments will get flagged as spam and then purged, but that’s just the way it is: comment moderation on my blog is best-effort :-)
Xaprb
21 Feb 13 at 9:47 pm