Comment Spam Gets Trickier
I’ve noticed a nasty trend in comment span here lately. So far it’s only a couple of posts, but it could become a flood. Comment spammers are copying sentences out of legitimate comments and resubmitting them with a link or two changed.
If you’re not careful, this can even fool a human inspection since the spam is thereby on topic and relevant. If it comes a couple of months after an original article was posted that received a lot of comments, it’s very easy to miss.
We may need to adjust comment filters to flag comments that copy content from previous comments. I’m not sure if any of the existing filters do that or not.
Even worse, now I’ve caught at least one apparently Polish spammer copying text out of other blog entries that reference this one and submitting that as comments here. The only hint that it’s spam comes from the site linked to. I don’t know if Bayesian analysis will catch these. Possibly a quick, automated Google plagiarism search might be in order?
May 18th, 2007 at 8:09 am
I’m getting inundated by blog spam. It goes into my moderation queue, but it’s quite annoying to have to sort through it and delete it all the time. Do you know of any wordpress plugin to do a simple catpha or one of these annoying additions (please type result of 4+9)?
May 19th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Akismet’s the way to go. It reduces comment spam to a much more manageable level without any annoying captchas.
For a slight extra level of protection, set WordPress to require moderation for any comments that contain URLs. That blocks most of the spam that sneaks through Akismet, but it does require you to approve some legitimate comments.
You can also try moving the comment scripts from the regular URLs to something else. That stymies some of the robots.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:35 am
I suggest you can send a confirm code or active linke to submiter’s email.
Then he must active his comment by submit the code or click active link .
Other suggest ,you can add some code to submit file for check the comment text is alreay in database.
(maybe no useful)
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:59 am
I’ve been using Spam Karma 2 and it’s working great so far. I haven’t had any false positives at all. It also doesn’t bother me much with spam, every once in a while it sends me an email with a summary of all the spam it caught so you can keep track of it.
I was going to turn on Akismet but was confused by their licensing model. They want to charge for a commercial site, mine is not, but I just didn’t understand it much and I just veered away. I should give it a try though, but so far (keeping fingers crossed) Spam Karma 2 seems to be doing a great job.
June 4th, 2007 at 3:24 am
Wouldn’t it be better to filter on the URLs a post contains, rather than on the rest of the text? After all, those URLs are the reason for the existence of the spam.
Maybe someone could set up a central list of comments spam URLs, along the lines of the Adblock filter sets? Maybe such lists already exist?
August 9th, 2007 at 11:30 am
[…] guess it must because it just keeps increasing. And not only increasing, but it’s getting harder to spot – especially for those of us who often get a lot of comments and get a lot of […]