Look at this blog’s posts, both old and new. Even the most successful posts. See any comment spam?
Nope, because moderation stops it. (as an aside, I consider “hi, nice blog” posts to be spam, though not of the “sleazy” kind.) Manual moderation… until now.
But it’s getting quite annoying, because I have observed a pattern in several of my blogs, where a bot tries to post a 3-line spam which starts by complimenting the post, or the entire blog, in a generic way (and in English, even in my Portuguese language blogs), and then posts 2 or 3 links, disguised as news or technical articles. This happens in quick succession (usually 15 or so posts in a couple of minutes), coming from different IP addresses (probably zombie machines).
I have experimented with the Bad Behavior plugin before, but ultimately I had to disable it, because it blocked traffic at the HTTP level, including some legitimate (but perhaps not as well-coded as they should be) bots or external tools - once I couldn’t even connect with Konqueror until I changed my id string!
So, for the last couple of days I had to be moderating 15 or so posts per day… per blog… as spam. Recieving an email for each one, of course.
No more. I’ve installed the Spam Karma 2 WordPress plugin. Let’s see how well it works… the administration interface is excellent, and the plugin seems very well comprehensive and documented. So far, so good.
Now, where are some spammers when we need them?
Recent Comments