09.22.06
KILL SPAMmers…
First thing: Thanks to you who commented to my test [now deleted]. I wanted to make sure I had not inadvertently gotten blocked the handful of people who might conceivably comment here. If you were blocked from posting a comment and you don’t know my email address, please email me here (provided email address good for one week, courtesy of Spambox).
Now for the recommendations….
But first, a little story.
Once upon a time (it was not actually a dark and stormy night, but it could have been), I moved from my “apartment” at LiveJournal to this, my “home” here at BlueHost, where I had them set up a WordPress blog for me. Once I was up and running — in virtually no time at all, actually — I posted a few things. All was well and good in my personal corner (niche?) of the blogosphere. But I began to worry anyway… because that’s what I do, m’kay.
Specifically, I began to worry about “comment spam“, also called “link spam”. Although I had not received any, I knew it was only a matter of time. So, I installed Akismet.
You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
WordPress made installing the Akismet filter easy as (memorizing the first four digits of) Ï€. And, in the course of time, it began to catch spam. At first there were just a few. Then, there were a few more, and a few more. And then, there were a lot more. At last count, Akismet has caught 1050 spam comments to this blog. Top hits: ringtones, viagra (and other assorted pharmaceuticals), gambling. Not that I wanted to know; but Akismet saves all the spam in a database for a period of days before automatically deleting them. I did not have a single false positive, and I trusted the filter. It started bothering me, though, that the spam comments were getting so close to me, infiltrating my precious allotted hard drive space, wasting my even more precious bandwidth. I didn’t want to see the spam anymore, jailed by Akismet or not. I wanted it stopped before it reached me at all.
Enter Bad Behavior:
[A] set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.
There are a lot of plugins for WordPress, a number of them dedicated to stopping spam. Out of the many I looked at, Bad Behavior struck me as being particularly effective. So, I installed it. Quickly and easily, too, using Fetch. Once I fired up the plugin, I didn’t have too long to wait. Within an hour Bad Behavior had caught ~20 “spambots” (see the Web Robots FAQ for more info) trying to accomplish their nefarious ends. Since yesterday, it has caught 77 spambots. And nothing has gotten through even to Akismet. Needless to say, I am quite pleased with Bad Behavior and hope someday to donate some currency to its creator, Michael Hampton (who also happens to run a recommended site, Homeland Stupidity).
K. said,
September 23, 2006 at 3:57 am
I know you are as anal as I am, so I thought you would want me to point out that there seems to be some inconsistency in the name of the application you are talking about - is it “Askimet” or “Akismet”?
At any rate, this whole “comment spam” thing is new to me, and that absolutely sucks! (Judging by your previous entry, I’m thinking you feel the same way.) I guess LJ has some way of blocking that? Anyway, it seems it’s at least been a learning experience for you, which is all we can ask from life, I suppose.
Moody said,
September 23, 2006 at 8:27 am
~>grink<~
Allllllrighty then…. Fixed that. Stupid cut-and-paste-not-paying-attention thing.
Screening comments on LJ helps a lot of people, of course, but I’ve certainly heard a few times of people getting spammed there. I hear too that Six Apart are doing their best to combat spam on the backend side of things. They have their own list of plugins for MT users.
But, yeah, it’s a bigger issue out here in the cold, cold blogosphere… where the cold wind blows coldly upon you like a ghost and scatters sparks from your feeble little fire, and the coyotes howl beneath the dry, curved bone of the desolate moon; and the stranger may be an okay fella just like you or he could be a spammer — heeled ‘n’ fittin’ to spam you before you can reach for your six-shooter and plug him between his vicious, ugly, soulless, beady little eyes. How many a widow or widower has cradled a grip of flowers or a hat graveside, recountin’ the lynchin’ to the dearly departed and makin’ an oath not to see it happen ever again to no poor innocent? I shudder to think about it, ma’am; I surely do shudder.