Spam, Spam and More Spam.
Normally, spam doesn’t bother me too much. Sure, I hate it just as much as everyone else, but I usually have a fairly good handle on it. I run my email through Gmail and it has a fairly good spam filter (I currently have 1725 messages in my spam folder), but some items still make it through. The bigger problem though, is comment spam. Not only does this fill my site with crap, it also fills my inbox with garbage messages.
You see, I get an email anytime a comment is posted on my site. I like this because I get an instant notification and can respond accordingly. Unfortunately, if the comment is spam, then the message I get is spam as well. To combat this, I’ve been using the spam-filtering tools built into Wordpress to flag comments that contain a large number of links or a certain variety of keywords (I don’t get notified about these flagged comments) and, for the most part, this has been working fine.
A couple of months ago though, I started getting all sort of comment spam that didn’t contain the usual poker links and references to viagra. Instead, these messages contained short, often unreadable bits of text and the only link was on the author’s name. Basically, it’s your standard referral spam without all of the hooks that spam filters use to flag the message. For me, this has become a very big issue—my site and my inbox have been filling with crap and it has been driving me nuts. I’ve thought about implementing some sort of captcha system, but I’m hesitant to go down that road at the moment. So instead, I have installed the Akismet plugin that scans each comment and performs a variety of more sophisticated tests. Hopefully this will help and I’ll be able to gain control of my inbox again.
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