Posts Tagged "comment spam"

Reducing Wordpress Comment Spam

Posted on 17 Jun 2009 in Development | 4 comments

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a slow but steady increase in comment spam on my blog which although being caught by Spam Karma, is still annoying, taking up my time and I’m aware that Spam Karma is no longer being developed, maintained or supported.

I’ve had challenge and response in place for well over a year, but it was a pretty basic one such as “What colour is the sea? RED/BLUE?” but have decided that it was time to see what else was available and happened to stumble across reCaptcha.

I’ve seen reCaptcha on a number of websites, but was unaware of it being available to Wordpress users. The reCaptcha system uses successful decodings to helps digitise books for online use at the same time as protecting blogs from spammers. If the human can’t read what is shown, they can request a new set of words or can request they are played out loud.

If you mix the reCaptcha system with the Michael Toppa’s Deko Boko plugin, you can incorporate the reCaptcha process not only in your comments section, but your contact forms too.

I Like Honey

Posted on 7 May 2009 in Development | 1 comment

As many know, Affiliate Marketing is a part-time hobby of mine, with me still being one of those strange people who combines it with fulltime employment. Oover the past couple of days, working in the global messaging space, I’ve seen inbound emails increase significanlty on a global level not seen before. In the month of May alone, I expect to see the service I manage, trap in excess of 1 billion spam emails. Yes 1 billion and inbound emails blocked just for the company I work for!

Expecting it to only get worse over the next few months, and seeing an increase in blog comment spam, I’ve decided to create my own little honey pot. Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from websites.

To participate in Project Honey Pot, you only need to install a little script somewhere on your website and link to it. Project Honey Pot handle the rest, automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. The information collated is then shared with anti-spam developers and researchers.

So where are my honey pot pages and links? Well the links are spread about this and a few other websites, some visible others hidden from humans.

When you work fulltime in the messaging space, Spam can actually be a fascinating (sad) topic. Did you know, for example:

• it can take as little as one second from harvesting an email address, to it receiving its first spam email… the average is just over 10 days!
• in April 2009 the United Kingdom became the most spammed country in the world
• 85.3% of global email traffic is spam

It’ll be interesting (to me anyhow) to see how long it takes for my honey pot to capture a harvester or comment spammer. My guess is 2 hours 17 minutes from the time of this post…