How Much Spam does your Blog get?
As you can see from my sidebar, we’ve just gone over 11,000 spam comments blocked by Aksimet (as at 20th August 2008).
I’m not sure how long Nick was running Akismet etc before I took over Internet Babel, but I’ve just read about somebody hitting the million-spams milestone on their blog. I personally block quite a few comments that are human-spam as well, but I was wondering about your experiences with blog comment spam as well. I have a couple of Blogs on the go and I notice a definite variation in the type of spam comments that are aimed at one Blog or another.
IB (at a very rough estimate) gets about 35% Viagra and related, 35% student loans, 20% looking like they lead to nasty downloads and about 10% just utter rubbish (not including the human spam that I discard by hand).
Is that the same kind of spam breakdown that you guys get? How many comments does Akismet block for you each day? According to Aksimet’s own stats, approximately 88% of all comments are spam…
Do you use other tools/plugins to check for spam? If you implemented Captcha did you find a drop in legitimate comment numbers?
I’m thinking of knocking up some PHP code myself to check for human spam, so I can block ‘at source’ things such as those useless ‘nice post’ short comments and have bad word blacklists and that kind of thing. Just wondered what your experiences are….
I think that WordPress has a similar built in function (blocking certain words, IP’s, etc.) My blog just broke the 100 spam comments and that’s a bit weird considering it’s about three months old!
According to my Askimet page, my blog has gotten TOO MANY spam.
From the first day I installed the plugin, my blog has received 29,666 spam comments. Yup. You read that right. That number was taken right from my blog’s Askimet page.
Sly
http://slyvisions.com
Nice post.
But seriously, we get loads of spam too. Our blog and sitewide comment system are all my own code, so it works slightly differently to most prewritten scripts. We moderate all comments through a control panel and uses captcha. The majority are massive lists of html links. Which is great, because I actually use a modified version of bbcode, so we get a control panel of stuff like:
<a href="e;http://example.com"e>
Oh, and massive “BAN IP” button, which bans them from the site forever. According to my privacy policy, I will happily give away those IPs to whoever asks.
IronBlogger gets a lot of Viagra and nasty links for spam comments.
Did we also mention that we get a lot of spam as well?
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I’m curious to know:
a) if you see noticeably different ‘types’ of spam from one blog to another?
b) has implementing things like Captcha reduced your legitimate comments?
If you’re blog gets a lot of spam comments it only means that you’re doing the right thing because these spammers wouldn’t waste their time in spammy sites/blog.