Spam comments just got worse
The last days, we’ve experienced a lot more spam comments than usual. For some months now, we have removed about 50 spam comments each day here at Justaddwater.dk.
Now, that number has more than tripled. We removed 150 spam comments just in the last 21 hours.
Thanks to Akismet (wordpress plugin to remove spam comments), the removal is fairly automatic. However, the last couple of days, 20-30 spam comments slipped through. Why? Akismet glitch or downtime? Or the comments were unique so that they appeard on justaddwater.dk before Akismet could recognize it as spam.
Comments that slips through Akismet appears in the comment RSS feed until we manually remove them. Even though it’s usually not more that 30 minutes, it worries me.
What if more comments slip through? I’ve seen a few RSS comment feeds ruined by spam comments. How will Akismet keep up with increasing spam comment level? Can it handle spam level that triples globally? I really don’t know. For us, Akismet is the best we’ve got.
And now we’ve just taken one more countermeasure to catch the few that’s slipping through. I’ll leave that to a separate post tomorrow.
PS. For the curious, click on the pictures to see an image of the full list with the 150 last spam comments. I won’t hide anything from you: Mail and IP addresses are there.
Technorati Tags: blogging, akismet, wordpress plugin, spam comments
June 23rd, 2006 at 01:22 (GMT-1)
A tip: Although it is still unproven, you might consider encoding the entire comment form (after changing the form names and target urls).
On my site I used “Automatics” advanced encoder to encode the comment form. The result is the same impenetrable anti-spam measure that you get when you use the same technology to encode an email addresses.
http://automaticlabs.com/products/enkoderform
So far it has prevented any spam from being posted (but that tactic is only 2 months old, only time will tell if it is effective in the long run).
(Example: Look at the source on any page on my site, that have comments enabled.)
June 23rd, 2006 at 07:20 (GMT-1)
The spam attack has increased manifolds on my website too. Till recently, I did not have a single spam comment until there was a huge deluge. Thankfully Akismet has worked wonderfully for me. Additionally, I have also enabled the option of moderating any comment which gets posted on my website (through WordPress settings). This, I believe, prevents any comment spam to pass through, if Akismet fails. Not sure about it, but it works for me . Cheers! :-)
June 23rd, 2006 at 10:24 (GMT-1)
Is something going on? We’ve had masses of email spam recently – in the last 7 days we’ve had 26000 incoming emails and 23500 were spam – that’s 90% plus the little bit that the silter doesn’t catch, but that’s tiny in comparison.
I can’t believe that anyone without spam filtering on their email can even function, and it seems the same applies to blog comments.
June 23rd, 2006 at 12:56 (GMT-1)
I have seen a great increese of spam articles on formus also. Some of the car-related formus i read have been virtualy floded by spam..
June 23rd, 2006 at 14:16 (GMT-1)
If you look at the Akismet statistics you’ll also notice a HUGE spam increase in the last month or so:
http://akismet.com/stats/
It startet roughly around the 1st of May.
June 25th, 2006 at 00:05 (GMT-1)
[…] justaddwater.dk Instant Usability & Web Standards “I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.” « Spam comments just got worse […]
October 7th, 2009 at 20:20 (GMT-1)
I was amazed to see on the Akismet spam page, that more then 75% of all commetns left are spam, and that it blocks ~8mil a day. You think people would give up..