SPAM is no.1 enemy of all blogs, especially new ones. It usually comes in the form of automated comments submitted by various SPAM software but also in the recent days I have been seeing more and more human made SPAM comments.
Purpose of the SPAM comments is to draw attention to a certain site, number of sites or just some keywords. Most spam messages are obvious at first sight, but there are also those that are well covered. Hint: if the name used for the comment is anything other than a real name (for example "Make Money Online") it is likely that the person/software leaving the comment did it mostly for the purpose of own promotion.
Currently I use combination of two plugins to combat spam on this site:
- Akismet
- Bad Behavior
Bad Behavior is good for detecting automated comments and Akismet with it's learning mechanism is useful to filter out anything that passes through. But still there is certain amount of manual work required to keep things checked.
Since the problem of SPAM will only elevate in the upcoming time I made a simple poll (you can find it on the right side of the page) to find out what is the price for a total anti-spam solution you are prepared to pay.
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Posted in: Rants
TAGS:anti spam web protection, best anti spam, computers internet blog, how captcha prepared, preis test, price spam, spam price, spam prices, spam prices 2009, what price spam, what price spams, who spam, wordpress antispam plugin, wordpress spam
Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
10 Comments
well i dont mind that much link, i mean what is the website: for then, you can always remove it from your template.
about captcha i use http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/math-comment-spam-protection/
which is very very simple, and dosnt have picture. so its cool, if people dont like to add few numbers, screw them :mrgreen:.
Problem with your setup is
- many people do not like captcha
- human spam comments can be without links inthe text - just the link through the author name
Spam Plugins like Akismet and bad behaviour are just a waste of CPU usage. I just use captcha which prevents all automatic spam comments, and adjusted to prevent any post which have one link. that does it.
i mean people who spam post links to their pages, if no links are allowed then they cant, if they use www . abcted . com like method then i am always available to block them from ever entering my site again.
Sergej, I tried it and while the idea is ingenious in simplicity, it takes 5 seconds for a spammer to modify the code of their software to attack your site.
Yikes! :)
Like I said. I may have to revisit my thoughts on this in the future.
Great blog btw. Some very interesting stuff here. :)
I am not sure I could rely on Akismet alone ;)
Bad Behavior has blocked 15393 access attempts in the last 7 days
I agree with Rarst.
The more filters we install, the smarter the spammers (and spambots) get to work around them. People make the mistake of considering spammers low life idiots. They are much more intellegent than anyone gives them credit for.
Maybe I'm a hands-on kind of guy, but I wouldn't pay anything for additional spam protection. Akismet does 99% of the job anyway, I've found. Besides, out of the three blogs I've run I haven't had any major problems with spam that Akismet hasn't trapped anyway.
Maybe my blogs haven't been popular enough for spammers to consider a good target. (Yay for me?) If this changes, then perhaps my view on this may change as well. We'll see.
That's somewhat true, you can always avoid bad weather (if you move :)
I am proposing a solution that will be simple to implement, hard to crack and just work for most users. Instead of using several plugins you would use one and pay for it if it does the job in a satisfactory manner.
In my opinion "total" antispam solutions are recipe for disaster. There is no such thing as one-fits-all here and if person's goal is to setup plugin once and never ever touch and educate it - it would work terrible.
Spam isn't enemy - it's like bad weather. You must learn to deal with weather, buying ultra-special-dealer-with-weather is not going to do that. :)
I published a new Wordpress Antispam Plugin: http://wpengineer.com/antispam-wordpress-plugin/