Over the past three months I’ve seen a 200% increase in comment spam to this blog. The numbers are staggering when you start to think about all the wasted resources.
There were some 47,722 spam comments or trackbacks on this blog in December 2012 detected and blocked by Akismet. There were only 44,640 minutes in the month of December so that means that there was more than 1 spam comment or trackback every minute for the month of December 2012. Think of all the wasted bandwidth, disk space, processing time, etc and it quickly starts to add up when look at the scale of it. I can still remember receiving my first comment and thinking wasn’t that nice of them “Great Blog!” only to realize after a few minutes that comment was intended to just showcase the URL link in the comment.
I’ve posted before about the problem of spam comments in December 2010. Unfortunately since I’m no longer using Apache the .htaccess files that I had setup then no longer work not saying that was a good solution but it was something at least. I’m curious what everyone else is doing? Is anyone blacklisting certain countries? I know from experience that won’t solve the problem, although it might help slow it a little.
Cheers!
Hi Michael,
I’m using Akismet too. I check the spam folder regularly and found it to be 100% effective so far. I have to approve the first time a new person comments, but have found it to pretty painless. Not sure I’ll bother blocking ips. Btw, seems like every one is selling dr. dre beats headphones.
Hi John,
I would have probably have quit blogging by now if it wasn’t for Akismet.
The SPAM isn’t getting through per say just chewing up a lot of processing on my server.
Thanks for the comment!
Hey John, Can you send me the Dr. Dre beats headphones John? Those send pretty sweet.
I just leave it wide open, I guess I have gotten lucky for the 3 real people a day that go to my blog. I think its all my mom and wife anyways :)
Thanks for the clarification Michael.
Brent, I’m far too cheap to buy a pair for myself, never mind buy a pair for you!.
/john h
Good grief thats a lot of Spam!!! You running wordpress? Akismet does a pretty amazing job. You must have tons of page views. Ive never dug into how akismet does it but hardly any ever makes it through. Interested to hear more on how you manage your blog, it looks great.
Respect,
-Brent
Hi Brent,
It’s WordPress for sure, left Google’s Blogger behind years ago.
Akismet is a life saver… unfortunately the spammers are using automated software to call /wp-comments-post.php directly so they aren’t really generating pageviews.
I use the WordPress apps on iOS/Android to help manage the site remotely. I did use Microsoft’s Live Writer at one point to draft my posts but fell away from doing that a few years ago.
Thanks for the comment!
I had similar problems and was deleting more than 30 spam comments a day at one point.
In the end, switching to Disqus was my solution. Also, Disqus is helpful if you moderate several websites. I’m not completely happy with Disqus, but it does work.
Hi Greg,
I’ve looked at Disqus from time to time but I’ve read that the SPAM problem can be just as annoying with that solution. I also looked at Livefyre in the past. Perhaps I should give another look.
Thanks for the comment!