2073 spams in 7 hours
I just woke up, looked at WordPress, and see that I had 851 spams waiting in moderation for me to mark as spam. I’m getting pretty fast at going through those and deleting them. Took about five minutes. Now WordPress says that since midnight last night (it’s now 7:29 a.m. in San Francisco) my blog has received 2073 spams.
Anyway, I just received my Washington Post newspaper. Oh, wait, is it paper at all? Interesting format. Alex Brown told me about that. I think I’d still prefer to read my news in Google Reader, but there’s something nice about being able to see the layout.
Good morning, I need coffee. All this spam in the morning makes me ornery.
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May 22nd, 2007 at 8:09 am
It’s not complicated. You know the wordpress team. Tell them you want captcha for your blog comments or you’re switching.
http://www.google.com/search?q=captcha+php+png&btnG=Search&meta=
There you go, all word press has to do is cut and paste if they do not know how to draw numbers and letters on a canvas with a brush to create a png.
There are at least 200 times less spammers that will take the time to physically spam you in person.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:12 am
:) Its like the spam you get in your weekend paper (auto classifieds). much worse though.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:29 am
Robert, I honestly don’t understand why you don’t use a captcha. I know they’re not perfect, but they’re by far the best way to prevent comment spam.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:44 am
“Its like the spam you get in your weekend paper”
Like the magazines you get with 20 pages of content and 200 inserts which fall out when you open it. At least you can chuck them on a fire and get a bit of heat out of them
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:09 am
Granted, I don’t have the traffic you have (not by a looong shot, and then some), but I have found one of the math comment plugins to be effective. The one I use is at: http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/math-comment-spam-protection/
Granted, it requires a tad more interaction, but I have not found it onerous when confronted with it on other sites.
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:17 am
I think WordPress.com blogs are getting targeted be spammers. A few days ago, my little WordPress.com tech blog got 1000 spams in one day.
After reading your previous post on spam, I installed captcha on my main WordPress.org blog and bingo, no spam at all - which then makes Akismet false positives simple to find.
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:38 am
Maybe you should outsource the job of sorting the spams?
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:13 am
Dude, wordpress must have a craptacular comment spam management system. My MT setup lets me get rid of the majority of them via “Empty junk folder”, and the rest takes about 5 minutes. So out of any given day, comment spam management is MAYBE ten minutes.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:57 pm
WOW!
I know some people who work at the Post (as technologist not journalists) and I’m wondering if they had a hand in it. Not only does it seem to work smoothly on Linux, but it works pretty darned good (well, after 3 whole minutes of trying it anyway).
I personally think the various methods of making newspapers into web pages (regardless of the technology being used) is wrong, as in ten years there will be active readers who have never laid eyes on a real newspaper (or at least never paid attention to one) so the emphasis on mimicking the original format is misplaced.
What needs to be done instead is add a layer of abstraction between the input format and the two (at least) output formats so that all properties of both formats, the printed and the web-based can be addressed by the back-end (probably XML or something) source data. Things like how many parts the article can be split into, where the first part appears, what ads (or type of ads) it will be associated with, content tags, and so on could be used to automatically produce both the web and printed version without much manual intervention (of course the editors don’t want to be out of work so some decisions about headlines and what appears on the front pages of each section are probably not going to be automated, not this generation anyway).
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Did you turn off Akismet? I’m sure my traffic is far lower than yours, but it is rare that Akismet misses a spammer. I had some blogs running B2Evolution and had to shut them down because of the spammy trackbacks, but WP has been wonderfully spam-free for me.
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Akismet is still on. It’s blocking 5 out of every 6 spams. But I’m getting that much per day. The rate has recently gone way up, though.