Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Fighting comment spam

Filed under: Site management by Hari
Posted on Sat, Dec 31, 2005 at 14:57 IST (last updated: Thu, Jul 17, 2008 @ 10:49 IST)

Over the past few months the volume of comment spam on this blog had reached irritating levels. Most of these were bot spam and they were tricking the default moderation queue feature by not posting any links in the comment body but using the user website field. There was also plenty of trackback/pingback spam. Almost everytime I logged in, I found a dozen comments in the moderation queue and a not a few that had slipped through deviously.

Till now I had been deleting these manually, but it was getting rather repetitive and annoying to find the same kind of spammers hitting the blog again with more useless junk. Now I have decided not to take this any longer. While captcha (word verification) is a good idea to prevent spambots, it is a nuisance to the genuine commenters by forcing them to enter a random string. So I decided to use other methods. There are quite a few good anti-spam Wordpress plugins found at codex and not all of them use the captcha technique. I decided to give this one a try. I'll be keeping an eye out on how it works in the next few days.

4 comment(s)

  1. Anyone with a name like "viagra" and "online poker" should not be allowed to comment or trackback. Hey! Bad-Behaviour is php generic- should work with bBlog then. yay! thanks for that.

    Comment by titanium_geek (visitor) on Sat, Dec 31, 2005 @ 23:02 IST #
  2. Thanks for the link! I've been getting a few "viagra" and "online poker" comments recently, and although there were only a few they still took a while to delete manually. Anyway - thanks! :D

    Comment by J_K9 (visitor) on Sun, Jan 1, 2006 @ 07:44 IST #
  3. Oh, and Happy New Year! :D

    Comment by J_K9 (visitor) on Sun, Jan 1, 2006 @ 07:44 IST #
  4. Titanium_geek, yes. That plugin should work on other blogging systems as well.Wishing you all a happy new year as well! :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Jan 1, 2006 @ 07:58 IST #

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