I’ve been waiting a while now to get my 13000th comment spam (don’t ask me why, I’ve just noticed the number creeping up to 13000 lately, and I’ve been counting down the days).
A while ago, I had decided to go with a challenge question as well as Bad Behaviour (which are both ways to block comment spam before it even happens). Unfortunately, however, Bad Behaviour slowed down the admin of this site to a crawl, so I had to dump it.
As for the challenge question, I didn’t notice any decrease in spam at all. While I didn’t exactly do any before-and-after quantitative analysis on the effects of the challenge question, I have noticed that most of my spam is of the automated bot type — not some spammer sitting there typing in long comments about shady online pharmacies.
So my conclusion would be this: challenge questions aren’t really an effective way to fight spam (at least not in my case). Has anyone else had a different experience with the spam they get or the tools they use to fight them? With all that spam out there, it makes you wonder how much more we can really handle.
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April 29th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I don’t know why, but I get minimal comment spam on my blogger hosted blog? I do have a group blog hosted on wordpress which has less traffic but heaps more comment spam, but no where near the numbers you are talking.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:02 am
My guess would be that Blogger has some way to protect their user base from comment spam — something like Bad Behaviour. I think they probably just block known spammer IP ranges or something of the like in order to get rid of (at least) the automated spam.
July 13th, 2008 at 8:29 am
I`ve noticed that…every time someone “finds” an anti spam measure, the spammers comes with a greater spam method…It`s just the human kind: the fight between the good and the evil (never tired).
July 14th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Very true Filmari. I think in this case, where’s there’s money to be made, there’s always going to be someone who tries to find a way around any system.