From Akismet:
“There are currently 1141 comments identified as spam.”
I cleared out all the spam comments yesterday morning. So those 1141 spams came in in the last 24 hours. Yikes.
Akismet let maybe a dozen (probably less) through to moderation during that time, so it’s batting about 99%.
It also blocked a couple of valid comments by John Grden, but no great loss. 🙂
Just kidding, John! I LOVE YOU MAN!
Haven’t had a spam comment in a long time. I implemented moderation and this plug-in:
http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/math-comment-spam-protection/
I’ve been using Bad Behavior (http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/) and so far nothing has made it past that into Akismet…
Dave, yeah, I have moderation too, so I don’t think any spam actually makes it to the page. And Akismet does catch the vast, vast majority of them. So in general, I don’t worry about it. Just happened to see the numbers and was shocked. But I might try the math comment plug-in. Might as well stop them from even being submitted.
been testing math comment, but it seems to create a real long delay between pushing the submit button and the page refresh. I wound up double submitting a number of times because I thought it didn’t take and clicked again.
on second look, even without math comment, comments are taking a while to post…
One more try…
Well, math comment has cut things WAY down. I’m pulling in about 10 spam comments an hour, as opposed to about 100. Amazing still that those 10 or so are still getting through. Is that actual humans entering those comments???
Hey Keith, you might want to increase the range of numbers for the math question. Mine goes up to 30. I figured most people visiting my blog should be smart enough to add more than single digits, except perhaps for serial spammers.
Oh, are you sure you have moderation on? I just posted and it just went through immediately (unless you’re sitting there all day moderating, I don’t think it’s working). 😎
Moderation for new commenters. Once you’ve been approved, you’re in. 🙂 Haven’t had a problem with that.
Ah I see. Proud to be approved. The only catch is there’s no way to identify who people say they are. Spammers can still use approved name/email/url to spam.
Now, what is the sum of 27+28…
Well the approval seems to work fine. To get through, a spammer would have to actually know an approved commenter’s email address, which are not published, so unless they knew someone or researched it, they wouldn’t get through. Otherwise, they would have to post at least one valid comment, which I approved. Then they would be able to spam, but then I’d see the spam and mark it as such and they’d be blacklisted. Neither case has ever happened yet, and it saves me from having to manually approve most of my comments.