Scobleizer - Latest Comments in I’ve lost control of my comments…

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Search — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:33:23 -0000

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Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Stephen Rider — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:08:02 -0000

I know at least one commenter has suggested Spam Karma. With a twist, I make the same suggestion:

There is an Akismet plugin for Spam Karma. This is different than running the two WordPress plugins at the same time: this makes Akismet work _within_ Spam Karma as one of its many tests.

I use it, along with Bad Behavior, and it's surprising rare that I actually get spam comments. Briefly put, it works very, very well.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Mark Jaquith — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:22:58 -0000

Fixing this is on my short list of things to do for WordPress 2.3 And as things tend to flow from WordPress trunk to WordPress MU trunk to WordPress.com fairly quickly, hopefully WP.com users can benefit too.

I haven't worked out all the details, but the half-baked plan would already greatly speed up comment administration, which will make Akismet's bad days (or theoretical demise) easier to handle.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Rachel Luxemburg — Thu, 24 May 2007 13:45:06 -0000

I have had to stop using my primary online "handle" because it was getting my comments deleted at an increasing number of blogs. Changing it is hardly onerous, but it's kind of annoying that I had to do so just because of spam.

If anyone's curious what it was, I'll spell it out and hope that it doesn't get this comment tossed:

f-i-a-t l-u-x

My assumption is that the first word is not just Latin, but also a brand name, and thus gets flagged.

Annoying.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

shokk — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:49:35 -0000

On the Wordpress server software I can install the Comment Policy plugin. After installing that the blog spam dropped way low. Really only manual spam got through.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Lloyd Dewolf — Tue, 22 May 2007 21:22:21 -0000

I use coComment so that I never lose my comments whether never pre-moderated or lost to a spam filter.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Rick — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:13:23 -0000

Sorry if I sound jaded, but with these kind of issues like with the whole Kathy Sierra thing, I just find it extremely annoying leading bloggers seem to think they are the first that have to deal with these kind of issues.

Spam and misbehaving anti-spam filters and bots are stuff we've had to deal with for over a decade now on various internet-platforms.

No "commenting in blogging is broken". More like, move along, nothing to see...

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

mike3k — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:35:29 -0000

I had one day of over 1000 spam comments (almost all pharmacy spam) and after I deleted all of those in less than an hour I had about 50 more. That was exceptional; it must have been some major spam attack. It does seem to come in big waves like that. Usually I get about 100 a week. Since I started, Akismet caught 12,336 spams.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Liza Sabater — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:47:34 -0000

Spam comment and spam trackbacks is the #1 reason I switched to Drupal.

Neither MovableType nor WordPress can deal with the spamm attacks my blogs suffer everyday --at about 5K a day combined and in a slow day.

Just culturekitchen alone has come under attack with 1K spam comments and trackbacks an hour. Back in 2005, the last attack cost me over 1K in overage bandwidth and I ended up with over 25K spamments to delete --and that's on my high traffic blog, not on any slow posting, abandoned site.

I have been battling this now since 2005 and only see it getting worse with now the emergence of spamming cartels in China and Brasil. And yes, they are like the frigging mafia. Russian spammers are the worse.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Razib — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:35:26 -0000

The story I am getting here really made me crazy. I have just started to write a blog about lives of people from Bangladesh, and I m now really thinking what will I do if I fall in a problem like yours! Canvas of life - The lives of real people

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Mike D — Tue, 22 May 2007 03:06:00 -0000

Just in the past week I've noticed a huge jump in comment spam to my low-traffic blog. I used to get a few per day. Now it's 60-70 spam comments per day. I can't imagine how you deal with 1,000 per day.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Robert Scoble — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:52:46 -0000

Joe: oh, they'll find a way, believe me! Heheh.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

JoeDuck — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:51:42 -0000

Robert, dude..if you delete all those comments how are you ever going to find out where to get your viagra and male enhancement products?

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

kelly — Tue, 22 May 2007 02:18:19 -0000

lol you need LiveJournal. :D

(Or at least OpenID?)

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Krish — Tue, 22 May 2007 01:47:38 -0000

Robert,

Probably you should close the comments and use a forum software for any discussion. This way, you can avoid those spams and people can still post their opinions inside the forum. Just my 2 cents.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

David Jones — Tue, 22 May 2007 01:40:41 -0000

I like the idea of CAPTCHAs, but all the implementations out there looked really easy to break. I saw this site while browsing around though:

http://recaptcha.net/plugin...

It's a really interesting type of CAPTCHA that uses words from books rather than generating the CAPTCHAs. In the end, the CAPTCHA can be used to read (do OCR) on the book!

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Joao — Mon, 21 May 2007 23:31:44 -0000

One easy way to kill almost all automatic SPAM is to use Ajax with a custom protocol for posting the comment. Most SPAMmers take advantage of the standard HTML posting routines which are supported universally. Once one requires Ajax (JavaScript) and a custom protocol, SPAMmers would need to go out of their ways and use slower tools like real browsers or other JavaScript emulators to try to fake their postings, and not only that, as they would need to understand the protocol and adapt their tools to your unique protocol convention.

Basically, one day of programming for someone experienced with Wordpress to add such a thing. It's really tiresome to allow for SPAMmers to fill the comments, even with anti-SPAM checks in place like bayesian filtering.

As most Web programming out there requires JavaScript, it should be pretty standard anyway, despite going against some of the sacred Web standards out there, though. :-)

Just a tip!

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

RachelC — Mon, 21 May 2007 22:01:31 -0000

On my personal blog, I use a plugin that closes comments after 3 weeks plus a captcha program that asks you to add 2 numbers together. I get very little spam - if it does get through it's usually caught by Akismet. On the other blog, which has no captcha, I get lots of spam - almost all Akismet caught but I still have to go with it. Installing a captcha is definitely the next step

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

viinnie mirchandani — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:17:24 -0000

I Feel your pain, man

I once tried to put a follow on comment on your blog within a few minutes of the first and it deleted that...may be another pattern?

On spammers. I have heard most of the spam in the US originates in a FL town and the local authorities know about it and will not do anything about it. Not sure how true but its amazing Interpol, FBI cannot do much about the crisis it has become...

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

David Dalka — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:15:51 -0000

First, blame search engines that reward and cause the behavior not Akismet.

Second, trackbacks are more broken than comments. A blogosphere without every blog having trackbacks is lame.

Third, I sent you this tip a while back and you didn't post it. Lorelle did. But not everyone reads the great info she has. It needs wider attention.
http://www.daviddalka.com/c...

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Cale Bruckner — Mon, 21 May 2007 20:04:20 -0000

I've always used MovableType for my blog and had real problems with comment SPAM until I upgraded to MT 3.2 and started manually adjusting my filters based on trends I was seeing in my SPAM. SPAM filters, with a little love, have done wonders for me. - Cale

This a related post I posted on my blog: http://www.palmit.com/archi...

This comment will probably be deleted by Akismet.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Frank Roche — Mon, 21 May 2007 19:14:12 -0000

Robert, I'm using WP, but doing the hosting myself. One way I solved for the tons of spam was to rename my comments.php to something else. The spammers look for comments.php and trackback.php on the million+ WP sites...let them go for the big kill...while I was getting nowhere near the kind of spam you get (nor the traffic), I was seeing days of 2,500 pieces of junk. So, I renamed by two files and implemented a capcha, and voila! No more spam. Immediately. I wonder if that might work on your WP-hosted site. Seems nuts that your are being bombarded and can't keep up with it...WP should help.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

engtech — Mon, 21 May 2007 18:57:25 -0000

@robert:

So I just wrote a program for Wordpress.com blogs that turns off comments for all posts older than 60 days (using XML-RPC). I'll do a study over a few weeks to see if that drops my spam levels (1500/day right now) to something more manageable. If it is worth doing, then I'll release the program.

Cheers.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Chris Paton — Mon, 21 May 2007 18:46:53 -0000

I don't know why there isn't a CAPTCHA built into wordpress.

It would eliminate spam and the need for akismet.

I know that having a captcha would reduce the revenue from 'corporate' akismet subscriptions but it doesn't look to me like they are that interested in making money of akismet - it's only $50 even for a corporate licence.

Re: I’ve lost control of my comments…

Software Projects — Mon, 21 May 2007 18:21:37 -0000

Scoble - it sounds like most of your comment-spam is bot generated. Click on my name to learn how we effectively got rid of all bot-generated comment spam. Let me know if you want the WordPress step-by-step.