June 15, 2006

Are spammers winning?

I don’t know what is going on anymore. There used to be several highly touted spam prevention efforts for WordPress a few months ago. But there has been no word from any of them in a while and comment and trackback spam actually seems to be on the rise again. Have the spammers won? Have the developers given up? (Or to get really paranoid, been bought off by the spammers? :p)

For quite a long time, I would get one or two spam messages a day and that was OK. It would be caught by whatever spam combatting plugin I was using and it would sit there in my moderation/spam queue and I would come by every couple of days and delete the messages. The spam still gets caught but now there’s like 20-30 messages a day instead of the 2 or 3 a day. Me being a lazy guy, it is much more time consuming to have to go through all the caught spam, verify that none of it is legit and then to delete it all.

I tried WordPress Hashcash in the hope that that would stop the spam being submitted in the first place. It didn’t even seem to slow them down :p I then tried Anti-spam Image but I still got around 25 spam comments overnight. So, the methods designed to ensure that spam never gets submitted to your blog at all don’t seem to work too well. The methods designed to stop spam from getting published do work but end up in creating a lot of work for you because you have to spend time wading through the chaff just on the off-chance there is some wheat hiding in there. What do you do? I don’t know. I guess the solution would be to code something of my own but I really don’t want to get into coding right now :p

Tags: Blogging, Software
Posted by Fahim at 7:06 am   Comments (0)

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