Over on wondergeeks.net they list the six most recent comments made on aggregated websites. It’s how I keep up-to-date with websites I’ve commented on, instead of subscribing to comment feeds. It’s easy to do because there are really only a handful of blogs I comment on, and they’re all on wondergeeks (except very occasionally for Paul and Alasdair). New comments are easy to see at a glance, so I don’t have to engage my brain in order to figure out what’s going on.
Now various people on wondergeeks (Geof and John, in particular) have written a few posts about their spam-fighting efforts. I didn’t pay much attention because I hadn’t received any comment spam up until a few weeks ago when Alice saw six or seven of my entries had been spammed. That night I went and installed Spam Karma to take care of things, as Geof seemed to have had success with it. Within a week I got five or six comment spam attempts blocked, and all was good.
Then I ignored it, as I seemed to be spam-free. I had configured Spam Karma to mail me a digest whenever ten spam comments came along, but I never received any emails. Over the next couple of weeks I got a few emails saying legitimate comments were posted, but nothing about spam-fighting efforts. I saw that Heather and Andy were getting attacked nearly every day, and John had a few trickle through his defenses, but I wasn’t getting anything.
I was feeling left out. Maybe I’m not important enough to spam.
Then I decided to check the actual Spam Karma logs and bingo, there they were! Spam! Lots of spam! As of right now Spam Karma has deleted 183 spam comments. I guess I am important enough after all, and I guess Spam Karma can’t email me for whatever reason.
Minor bug aside, Spam Karma kicks ass.
#1 by Geof F. Morris on February 19th, 2005
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Funny, I set it to not send me notices every ten attempts. This is for two reasons:
Just wait until TrackBack hits you, though. At that point, you’ll want Spam Words as well, at least until SpamKarma and WordPress can get together and figure out how to get TrackBacks blocked properly. [If you're curious, my 1.5 install is running SK only because I'm really and truly too lazy to mess with the newer comment spam filtering. I think the tools will work to fit the new capabilities of WP, but for now ... I'm letting tools do the heavy lifting.]
#2 by Brad on February 22nd, 2005
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I don’t allow TrackBacks, so I don’t think I have to worry about spam coming from that angle. :)
#3 by John Wilson on February 22nd, 2005
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Technically, all you’re seeing on the wondergeeks page is the trackback spams. I’ve blocked my blog from displaying them, but they still show up on wg. Every few days I go in and run a mysql query that deletes them all for me.
#4 by Brad on February 22nd, 2005
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Ah, that explains why I never see them when I actually load up your page then. Gotcha.
#5 by Geof F. Morris on February 22nd, 2005
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Ehhh, right now, I use a combination of SpamWords and TarPit to see if I can block them. If nothing else, I figure that I’m seeding my domain blacklist…