My blog hasn’t been running long, but the excellent Akismet has already caught over 100 spam comments for me – with a 100% success rate – no false positives, and none missed either.
Akismet recently cross the big milestone of one billion spams caught – that’s a whole lot of spam! According to the stats, of all submissions passed through Akismet, 95% were spam. With Akismet seeing about 10 million spam messages per day, it’s a good illustration of the scale of the problem.
Thankfully Akismet is proving very, very effective for me, and it’s the kind of system that gets better the more it’s used.
I’ve considered also using Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behaviour, but with Akismet providing this level of protection, I don’t think I need them just yet.
I may still deploy Bad Behaviour as a first line of defence, to stop spambots wasting CPU time and filling my database with spam comments (although they get automatically deleted after 30 days, so it’s not that bad).
It seems that the poxy spambots will target pretty much any web form they can find too. We have an affiliates system at work, with a form used to sign up for an affiliate account. Having an account doesn’t give you the ability to post your link anyway on the site, so I can’t see any advantages for SEO purposes or anything, but we’ve started seeing a *lot* of spam submissions coming through, and had to implement some rudimentary anti-spam checks.
If they get clever enough to get around my basic checks, I might write a bit of code to pass the submissions through Akismet (although I’d have to convince the boss to shell out for a commercial licence for it) or use something else (perhaps Bad Behaviour would be a good starting place).
I even get spam comments added to images on my old photo gallery (powered by the cunningly titled Gallery) – even though I disabled photo comments long ago.
I’m using the pyblosxom Akismet plug-in. It’s rejecting a load of comments that I have to assume are spam as it doesn’t store them. Two did sneak through. I tried to use a script that came with the plug-in to submit them as spam, but that didn’t work. I’ll have to check up on that.
With most comments and emails being spam the internet may eventually become unusable. Hanging is too good for them.
Thinking about it, the 2 spams that did get through may have been before I got the filter working properly. Since then I can see from the logs that a lot are getting blocked. I ought to write a script to count them so I can display it like you do.
Now reached 510 spams caught – spam volume seems to be increasing now. Keep up the good work Akismet!
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