My spam problems have become very acute, with five or so spam comments appearing on commonly visited posts each day. In response, I have kicked up the sensitivity of Spam Karma 2 by a couple of notches. My apologies if this makes it more difficult to leave legitimate comments.
Judging by some of the search strings that are leading people to the site, I think blogs that use Spam Karma 2 are being specifically targetted. I may need to adopt a new system once I get back to Oxford on the 16th or 17th.
[Update: 29 December 2006] I am having two spam problems now. One is annoying and one is just odd. The first is that some spam comments are getting through Spam Karma 2, even with the Akismet plugin. They have karma values of over 1000, which I think must be the result of a clever hack. I changed the page footer with the number of spams caught, to make it less obvious that I am running SK2. The odd thing is that the number of spams caught figure just doesn’t go up anymore. I have no idea why, or how to fix it.
[Update: 31 December 2006] For no comprehensible reason, the spams caught count has started rising again: jumping immediately by forty points. The best thing to do seems to leave it alone.
[Update: 2 January 2007] For some reason, today involved a veritable cascade of comment spam. At midnight yesterday, my filters had caught 870 spam comments. 24 hours later, they have caught 1065. That is 22% of all the comments received thus far, all on a single day. I am impressed that my new combination filtering system (details top secret) managed to catch every single one, without catching any real comments by mistake.
[Update: 21 January 2007] Because of aggressive spammers, I had to disable the ability of people in general to register accounts with the Wordpress installation for a sibilant intake of breath. People who want one should ask me by email, and I will set one up on their behalf.
[Update: 15 April 2007] I am surprised to see that I thought five spam comments a day was a large number, back in January. Now, I get more like 50. Thankfully, I have some better protections in place. As such, I am allowing user registration again. We will see how it goes.
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.htaccess is good for foiling spammers. Just Google it to learn how.
I have heard that, and will look into it when I return.
Then why have I seen so much spam going through lately?
Unfortunately, as some of you might have noticed, SK2’s performances as seen from the outside, seem to have dropped suddenly over the past few days. While the bulk of the spam still remains at the door, a meaningful percentage now manages to fly right through SK2’s basic filters. And given the numbers involved, even 1% of all spam attempts is a lot to deal with. There again: SK2’s blacklists learn, and conscientiously flagging each uncaught spam should help keep things under control, but this is still a major quality drop from SK2’s usual performance.
The reason for this sudden burst, is a new breed of spam, or more likely, of spambots. It is confirmed now that some spammers have gotten hold of much more efficient spamming tools. Ones that bypass some of SK2’s strongest filters without trouble.
Also of note is the fact that Trackbacks and Pingbacks are absolutely unaffected by this issue (although a small unrelated bug was fixed in the latter SK2.1 releases and you may want to upgrade again from the site: more on this later).
Source
I have added the Akismet plugin for Spam Karma 2. Perhaps it will help.
I used to get hundreds of spam comments each day, and I’ve even wondered if that was what eventually exploded my blog at the start of November. I thought SK2 was deleting them - but could it possibly have been leaving them in the system somewhere?
Since Re-Birth, I’ve used Akismet and so far haven’t been found by the spammers. (I hope)
Good luck!
Tony,
SK2 does keep spam comments, as an archive to check new comments against. Even many tens of thousands of text comments would not take up very much disc space. I doubt they would clog an SQL database too badly, either.
Note regarding that last comment of mine:
Keeping too many spam comments in SK2 can make it intolerably slow. Now, I purge them weekly.
Note to self:
Keep an eye on this thread.
Now, the campaign against spam is being fought on my wiki.
This is especially annoying to have to do from Paris…