Comments on: Latest Attempt to Curb Comment Spam

By: Jim Mirkalami

Jim Mirkalami — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:11:25 +0000

I have been visiting this site a lot lately, so i thought it is a good idea to show my appreciation with a comment.

Thanks,
Jim Mirkalami

By: Bret

Bret — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:23:17 +0000

Thanks for sharing your spam experience Stephen. I’m going to take a look at that trackback validator plugin and see if it helps my situation.

By: Stephen Cronin

Stephen Cronin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:23:52 +0000

Bret,

The answer is probably simple. I had the same thing. I used a captch plugin to stop the bots and it cut the numbers down, but some where still getting around it. These tended to target one or two posts. The answer:

The remaining bot spam is NOT comment spam. It is TRACKBACK spam.

I use the the Simple Trackback Validation plugin to stop these.

You can choose what to do with the trackback spam – at first I opted to put them in Askimet for a few weeks, then as there were no false positives, I decided just to nuke them.

Anyway, I’ve gone from hundreds of spam (in Askimet) each week down to a handful – maybe 1 or 2 per week, plus 3 or 4 for each post (from the scrapers).

By: Los Angeles Live Music

Los Angeles Live Music — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:56:11 +0000

meaningless comments that are not relevant are (at best) annoying , and at worst dangerous to readers computers (as they can be connected to virus sites) Defensio will probably work for you!

By: Mat

Mat — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:05:18 +0000

I promise you, with Defensio your spam queue will be *MUCH* easier to deal with, seeing it’s sorted by “spaminess”. Only the low-spammy comments (ie those most likely to be false positives) bubble up to the top… Further, you can actually hide “obvious” spam from view (above some threshold).

Do try it for a couple weeks, and let me know what you think.

By: Bret

Bret — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:50:29 +0000

Thanks for the response Matt. I just might give Defensio a try; however, the reason I wanted a Black List is that I wanted some spam to just get removed so my spam queue was easier to scan for any false positives. My previous problem was that I was getting overrun with spam that scanning for false positives in the spam queue was nearly impossible. Since I kept seeing the same spam getting caught over and over I just wanted to create a Black List so that once spam on the Black List was caught it would simply get removed which would make my spam queue easier to scan before hitting the delete button.

By: Mat

Mat — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:12:09 +0000

No Defensio doesn’t do a blacklist. We feel that the best solution — for consistency and performance — is to handle end-to-end filtering on the server side. Notice that we provide full transparency with your performance statistics, which means we stand by the performance of our algorithms. We’re now running around 99.7% accuracy overall — quite a bit high for really busy blogs… so really, a blacklist should not be necessary. Beyond performance, we think it’s the added convenience of easily identifying false positives (when they do happen) that really makes the service compelling.

Why don’t you give it a try for a few weeks and see how it works out for you?

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By: Bret

Bret — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:05:35 +0000

Hey Matt (hope you’re monitoring the discussion thread for this post), I was wondering…does defensio support the idea of a “black list?” I was reading the FAQs and didn’t see anything along these lines. What I’m looking for is a customized “black list” that I create. When something matches the “black list” then it instantly gets deleted. My previously probably was that lots of spam was getting flagged correctly, but the quarantine was getting so large that it was becoming impossible to scan for legitimate comments. I wanted something that would just delete something that matched my “black list.” Can defensio do something like that?

By: Bret

Bret — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:48:18 +0000

Thanks for the tip Matt.

By: Mat

Mat — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:45:44 +0000

this is why we built defensio.com… go take a look, and consider giving it a try!