Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Comment Spam

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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.

Akismet-Stats-Jan2013

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!

Stop Forum Spam Saves the Internet

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Well they might not be saving the Internet but they’re definitely helping to save me a lot of time and effort.

If you’ve been following this blog you know that I’ve been fighting back the seedier elements of the Internet trying to stem the flow of SPAM both into this blog and into the discussion forums. In December of 2010 I resorted to blacklisting IP addresses from being able to comment on my blog and that seems to have helped stem the daily tide of ~ 50 a day to about 4-6 a day. After working on the blog I’ve turned my attention to the discussion forums. I found a great many bots were registering as users, passing the reCAPTCHA check and completing the email verification. Those bots then appeared to be performing one of the following; 1) capturing forum member email addresses, names, etc. and 2) re-posting previous posts with hidden or visible links that took users to scam websites.I needed something more than reCAPTCHA and/or email verification and I found Stop Forum Spam setup by Russ with help from pedigree. They are hosting a database where forum administrators and moderators can go to compare notes and check for previously flagged accounts by username, IP address or email address. Thanks to the Simple Machines Forum modification called Stop Spammer by M-DVD and snoopy_virtual I was able to easily integrate the API offered by Stop Forum Spam into the Simple Machines Forum installation that runs the discussion forums.

I’m really excited to see how well this works and I’ll make sure to report back after a few weeks.

I might also consider installing the httpBL mod by snoopy_virtual for additional protection.

Thanks to Russ, pedigree, M-DVD and snoopy_virtual for their contributions to the community.

Cheers!

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