Feb 23, 2007 - Miscellaneous    5 Comments

Stopping Blog Spam

After reading Frasers blog the other day, I noticed that he too was experiencing an increase of spam and he also used the standard wordpress Akismet. Although I am finding that it catches the majority of spam, it’s also throwing up a few false positives, i.e. blocking legititmate comments.

In an effort to combat this, I’ve just implemented Image Verification, which has worked successfully on other websites of mine, specifically for forums posts. The system I am using is a simple plugin available from Nio’s Weblog that requires no hacking of any php files – just the way I like it :)

imageverifywz6 Stopping Blog Spam

I have decided to leave the Akismet enabled at the same time as the image verification and will monitor it over a few weeks to see how effective it is. Fingers crossed, it should reduce the amount of ‘effective concrete walkway’ comments I am receiving lately. Does anyone else know of any other alternatives?

  • http://www.bloglyne.com Mark from Bloglyne

    This is interesting – I’ll be watching for an update. Please make sure to follow-up. Right now, http://www.bloglyne.com doesn’t have a huge issue with SPAM, but a couple of my other blogs get almost nothing but SPAM.

  • http://www.davidfiske.com David Fiske

    I’ve used simple maths hacks (e.g. what is 1+1?) on a few of my contact forms which has so far deterred spammers. The blog gets a few spam messages every now and then but I have to approve every comment before it shows.

    No great loss (well, apart from my time).

    Surely there has to be a solution out there that doesn’t involve moderation or verification. OK, perhaps not!

  • Rich

    Hey, I’ve just started getting some spam comments that were getting held for moderation, so luckily wordpress wasn’t displaying them, but it was still hassle having to delete them. I’ve installed this so hopefully things will work well.

    Only just came across your blog but it looks good so is now in my google reader list!

  • http://www.affiliateblog.co.uk Fraser Edwards

    Chris – how has this worked out now that you have been using it for a while?

    The maths plugin seems to be letting heaps of spam through :-(

  • http://www.webaffiliate.co.uk Chris Frost

    To be honest I am still getting a fair few spams every day also, however what I need to weigh up is, how many would I be getting without the image verification?

    I may turn it off one day and see what numbers get through, but to be honest mate, nothing is ever going to be fool proof unfortuantely :(