Annoyed: Comment Spam

on 06.10.05, 07:48pm in weblog • digg this • comments (7)

Ok. I’ve had it - I realllllly don’t want to turn off comments, but I’m getting blasted with comment spam again. Over 600 last night, to be exact.

Any suggestions?

7 Comments

    Randy (June 10, 2005 @ 10:48 pm)

    Yeah: blame Dave Winer for causing it and Slash Dot will pick it up. :)

    Phil Weber (June 10, 2005 @ 11:29 pm)

    I see that you use TypePad. If you’d consider switching to Movable Type, TypePad’s “big brother,” a number of anti-spam measures would become available to you.

    First, MT supports comment moderation for unauthenticated users: If a commenter signs in to his TypeKey account, his comments can optionally be posted immediately. Comments from unauthenticated users, however, remain in a queue until you explicitly approve them. You must still delete spam, but at least such comments never become visible on your site.

    There’s also a free plugin, MT-Blacklist, which automatically blocks comments containing certain keywords or matching regular expressions (both configurable). I have found that the regular expression ‘(casino|gambling|poker|holdem)’ eliminates a large portion of my comment spam.

    Steve (June 11, 2005 @ 5:49 am)

    Funny enough: I used to run on Movable Type, then switched to Typepad, since I didnt want to self-host it any more.

    Personally - I wish they’d enable TypeKey for Typepad (http://www.sixapart.com/typekey/)

    Jason (June 11, 2005 @ 7:20 am)

    Self-host is the only way to go. I program filters, and features as I need ‘em.

    Hope you don’t turn off comments. :)
    ~Jason

    thomas woelfer (June 11, 2005 @ 10:23 am)

    hi.

    i’m using dasBlog with captchas, that reduced comment spam to about zero, from several hundred each day.

    when that was done, the spammers turned on _referral_ and _trackback_ spam. i simply don’t render referalls and tracksbacks anymore - end of problem.

    WM_FYI
    thomas woelfer

    Randy (June 11, 2005 @ 11:53 pm)

    I read somewhere that TypePad is planning to add TypeKey for their blogs… I don’t remember when that was.

    FWIW, my comment spam dropped to 0.1% when I switched from MT (with MTBlackList) to TypePad… even with the filters, TypePad was better for a long long time.

    Dave (June 17, 2005 @ 9:01 am)

    any way you can add a field to the form html with a random number and have people enter it into a text box before the submission is added to the db? same style as other website validating that it’s a human user filling out the form.

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