Seriously, all this spam…

September 2nd, 2008 by Afraithe

What the hell… this WordPress installation got completely nuked with spam the last few weeks, even tho comments require moderation, it’s still hundreds of posts to go through.

I have removed the option to post comments here, and I had to actually remove the physical file from the harddrive cause even if you disable comments in the wordpress system, anyone can still post?!

And no the Akismet thingy did not work properly, it actually totally deleted every comment we had EXCEPT for the spam.

In my opinion, Internet is broken, when most of the data zipping around the wires all over the world is spam, the battle is lost. We got spam in our email (we get around 100-200 spam, per email account, per day), we have spam on our TinyMCE forum, on this developer blog, in the guestbook, on Sourceforge, on the Wiki, you name the service, its there. Our mail is ok though, about 1 each month comes through the spam filter there.

Must be some really sad ppl making all this crap up.

All of a sudden, a fee (and license) for actually sending 1 email doesn’t sound so bad, something has to be done.

Edit: We re-enabled comments, with some modifications.

Posted in Work

7 Responses

  1. Ryan Says:

    What about some kind of captcha thingy on this comment form?

  2. Afraithe Says:

    Well I looked into that, none really worked very well of the ones I tried, could be cause this theme is a bit old or something. Either way, any of the popular Captcha would probably already be cracked.

    We have made some modifications, and haven’t had a single spam yet.

  3. Jim Says:

    why you use WordPress?

  4. Afraithe Says:

    Well we also use it to test TinyMCE with the file and imagemanager in WordPress.

  5. Ray Says:

    Akismet actually catches nearly almost 99% of the spam. Maybe your installation had a problem.

  6. Bill D Says:

    The easiest way to combat spam is to add an input with style=”visible: false;” (or whatever the code is) so we won’t see it and most spam bots will put some value in that box anyway and if there is a value in that field throw the thing out as spam. It also helps to name the input something common, like “date”.

  7. Afraithe Says:

    Yeah we have made some safeguards to protect against spam now, seems to work. Not using Akismet though. Problem was that it doesn’t actually delete the spam (we had like 200 spam per day, at least) so it still piles up. Also it deleted all our previous comments that we had approved, needles to say, that addon got thrown out rather fast.

Leave a Comment

Please note: Comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.