The Spammers Win
I’m running two anti-spam plugins on this site, and I’m still getting overwhelmed by it. You might have noticed that I’m averaging two spam comments a day that get through. I delete them as soon as I can.
The worse problem is that I end up with about 80 spams a day in the spam bucket. The filter unfortunately is a little too aggressive and sometimes throws real comments in there. I’ve been scanning the spam bucket at least twice a day, but I’ve been missing some lately.
Even worse, the filter seems to have an agenda against certain readers. Lately, it has decided that everything Jeff Eyges writes shouldn’t see the light of day. Whether you agree with that idea or not, that’s my decision to make, not the spam filter’s.
Reluctantly, I have decided to add captchas. I find them inconvenient, so I didn’t want to inflict them on you guys. Worse, sometimes I come across one that is so hard to decipher that it takes me several attempts to get it right.
Anyway, you can thank the spammers that you now have the inconvenience of passing a captcha test in order to comment. If you have any problems with it, let me know via the Contact form.
June 1st, 2010 at 11:26 am
Apparently, the spam filter is more discerning than you are!
June 1st, 2010 at 8:31 pm
It’s just one more thing to go through, not too big of an issue to deal with really. Better than losing comments or having spambots.
June 1st, 2010 at 10:23 pm
So, does this mean you don’t wanna hear about my low cost cialis and viagra, or my revolutionary penis enlargement techniques? Not even about the African businessman who died and left billions of dollars I’d like to transfer into your account?!
June 1st, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Yes. That’s exactly what it means.
June 3rd, 2010 at 9:06 am
You’re running WordPress so I’m surprised it’s been that much trouble for you. Since I made the switch I can’t think of any spam that has made it to the live page it was submitted on and I get hit with a lot of spam.
I do have my comment settings configured such that the first time someone leaves a comment on my site it is moderated automatically, but once approved it doesn’t moderate it again unless it exceeds 4 links in the comment. That keeps any spam that doesn’t get caught by Akismet from appearing on the site proper while allowing folks with legitimate comments to get through once I approve it. I was using re-Captcha for a bit, but the theme I’m currently using doesn’t like it so I turned it off and it’s been fine without it.
June 3rd, 2010 at 9:21 am
Les:
The 80 spams a day were going into the spam bucket, but so were a few real comments. I can’t scan through 80 spams fast enough while also guaranteeing that I see all of the real comments. Then, like I said, about two spams per day actually made it onto the site.
It sounds like you aren’t looking through the spam bucket. Maybe the way you’re doing it is sufficient to avoid the false-positive problem.
I should have tried your approach with the moderate first time only. I might still give that a whirl.
June 3rd, 2010 at 9:48 am
The strange thing is that now I have no problem getting through.