My kids are starting the primary school equivalent of spring break (i.e no school, but no partying in Florida either) so I decided to slow down a bit on the blog this week.
Expect a one or two-part post on last Friday’s game tonight and maybe tomorrow but not much else this week. I could use the rest…
Also, I was assaulted by about 70 spam comments last night on my Legend of the Broken Dice post that somehow got through the Captcha. So I temporarily activated Akismet while I look into it (I might need to update a few of the other plugins).
Have a nice week y’all!
Akismet works great for me. I hardly have any spam since I installed it.
Hell Mike, I got 21 spams since I activated 1 hour ago…. I really don’t understand how they got through the Captcha…
I just may well do like Shamus and drop it if Akismet is now on.
I don’t really have very much spam (92 comments + 65 spam since I started the blog, and that’s counting my own comments which is probably at least half of the non-spam comments), so I can’t say what it’s like with a higher volume, but I’ve had a 100% catch rate with Akismet and a 0% false positive rate. It’s never let anything through which is questionable, and it’s never quarantined something which was valid. It’s caught some comments which appeared valid at first, but if you examine them you see that they’re actually just spam disguised cleverly as praise (what blogger doesn’t like having his ego stroked?).
No Captcha involved. These were all Trackback spams.
Only normal posts get the captcha.
You can see that I’m not qualified enough as a web geek to run this thing… Graham is going to send me a humongous bill one day…
Well mate, I’m up to 1,25$ with project wonderful, don’t call your stock broker.
Asmor: Those early comments are painfully sweet are they not?… Oh and don’t worry about your own comment ratio… I’m also near the 40-50% mark and I’ve got 1700! I think people appreciate when a blogger responds…
Pushing the appropriate button – $1
Knowing which button to push – $9999
Being a consultant – priceless 😀
Trackback spam is what we’re getting slammed with nowadays, which as pointed out, captcha doesn’t work against (not that we use it anyway.)
Akismet + Bad Behavior worked really well for a long time, but I had to disable Bad Behavior because it was doing weird banning things.
So we’re all fighting the same battle… weee!
Here’s another trick I use to help defeat the spambots-
Preventing Comment Spam in WordPress
http://www.hackslash.net/?p=69
That’s all well and good, Mike, but it has its own limitations.
In any case, it still only prevents comment spam, not trackbacks.
So how exactly do these trackback spams hurt you? They don’t appear on your site, right?
They do on this site. You can set them to not appear, however.
In a community like this, however, trackbacks between blogs are the most cost-effective form of advertising, and also help both the blog author and the readers find further discussion on topics.
I had 54 Spam trackbacks showing after the comments on my last Campaign log post. I deleted them manually this morning and then activated Akismet.
Since, it blocked over 90 spams, all casino-related, coming from the same IP.