Death to Spammers
Well, today, I had the dubious joy of getting my very first WordPress comment spam. Seven minutes later, I destroyed it, but I’ve been forced to activate some anti-spam measures.
Measure One: Any comment with more than two links in it will be sent to moderation. I’ll be notified of it by e-mail, and, after I approve it as non-spam, it’ll show up on the blog.
Measure Two: Also, any comment containing certain commonly-used spam words, like viagra and casino, will be moderated.
Measure Three: I’ve installed the No-Follow plug-in. Comment spam isn’t designed to get people to click on it; it’s designed to move the target page up in the Google rankings. The no-follow plug-in makes Google ignore the spammer’s links.
Hopefully, that’ll be enough. I’ve still got a few plug-ins I can try if that isn’t enough.
But if those fail, I’m going to have to resort to some well-placed hacks.
And I don’t mean the programming kind.
February 15th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
I was having a major problem with comment spam on my WordPress blog until I installed a captcha plugin. I’m completely sold on the idea — not a single comment spam has gotten through since. There are several captcha plugins available on the WordPress plugins page.
March 20th, 2011 at 11:57 pm
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the awesome work Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
September 7th, 2011 at 5:54 am
I think like any security system, design flaws in a system implementation can prevent the theoretical security from being realized. Many CAPTCHA implementations, especially those which have not been designed and reviewed by experts in the fields of security, are prone to common attacks.