blog comments boxes and spam

[john eden]

Apologies for these practical rather than theoretical threads... (well, not really )

Has anyone found a way around this?

I'm using b2 and am thinking of upgrading to Wordpress but it seems like these are peculiarly plagued by spam.

Do you use either of these? If so - have you sussed out how to solve it all?

Do you use something else which is better?

I currently have to delete all spam individually, which is like some kind of King Canute scenario. My back pages are drowning in a sea of canned meat!

 

[sufi]

aye me too
i deleted a couple of hundred off my site but it's a thankless task
the meme's blog is suffering too

you know i use mt, and i think there are plugins to implement blacklists so you can block IPs, i never bothered to try cos if i was a spammer i'd use different IPs

i remember reading some good stuff on muhajabah - her blog got spammed early on, (probably cos people actually read it....)


(at least spam makes it look like somebody reads the feckin thing...noone can read mine cos the link off woebot is broke... MATT!!! )

 

[Rambler]

Obviously you lose something by not having comments embedded within the post itself, but I use Haloscan and I've never had one single piece of spam. The reason spammers attack comments boxes is usually to pull their Google ranking up - but Google (and other search engine bots) don't generally follow pop-ups (it's Javascript, which the bots don't read), so any comments box in a pop-up is useless to the spammers, and therefore safe from spam.

 

[Wrong]

I use WordPress, and haven't had any trouble with comment spam so far, but this may well just be because I only switched over recently and the spambots haven't found me new URLs yet.

WordPress does have a number of plugins you can use to help stop spam - an IP blacklist (which is actually quite effective - I used one with my old blogging software), an option to require users to register/login before commenting, another to require them to read a number off an image. Another possibility is to automatically shut off comments for a post a couple of weeks after it is posted, which might work - I used to find the vast majority of comment spam I got was on old posts.

Ironically, when I went to the wordpress documentation to check out these options, I found that that page itself had been defaced by spammers (it's fixed now)...

 

[john eden]

Wrong - that's good info!

I certainly think that a cut off point would be good, tho not so sure about registration...

nice one