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Comment Spam

Over the past couple of days my blog has been heavily hit with comment spam. In the last 10 hours I've gotten more than 100 spam message attempts posted to my blog. I moderate all comments so none of those messages saw the light of day but I still have to deal with them. I've never really tuned the comment spam features of MT and I still haven't. Instead I installed a CAPTCHA system. Previously I had required TypeKey in order to leave a comment but that felt a little to draconian. Not everyone has a TypeKey account or wants to create one. Email whitelists are another option but that still requires that I approve or junk email addresses when they are entered.

I'm all about not even having to look at the spam. While this may mean I automatically trash some important comment or email, I think most people are coming to realize that when 90% or more of all email is spam, people will take drastic measures and at some point a message will be lost. As such I'm now running the SCode plugin. The usability of CAPTCHAs is a concern but unless I go back to TypeKey only comments I don't have another good solution at this point. In fact the use of TypeKey on my system just means that your comment will automatically be posted but you still need to enter the security code in order to post.

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Comment Spam:

» canning spam from Rotorglow
After Daniel R installed an anti-spam CAPTCHA I did some digging to see how much comment- and trackback-spam I was catching/not catching. The news is not good: This blog automatically catches about 850 pieces of spam a month. Happily,... [Read More]

Comments

Cool! (...that you installed a CAPTCHA, not that you, like me, have been bombarded by comment spam over the last few days...) I had simply modded comments and trackbacks way down, which solved it for the most part (especially in combination with our email whitelist plugin). But this is way more slick.....
Boy do I hear ya on the comment spam. I have been dealing with it for about two weeks now. Even though I moderate my comments and they never see the light of day, the same morons come back and try and spam....again and again.