This is completely inside baseball stuff for webloggers running the Akismet anti-comment-spam plug-in. If that ain’t you, you can safely press on.
Now then: Akismet doesn’t kill spam, of course, it just locks it up it in secret CIA prison camps hidden in friendly foreign dictatorships–no, wait…
Akismet quarantines suspected spam, but it’s up to you to inflict the actual act of spamicide. You have to do a spam-scan one or more times a day to make sure that there are no false positives — genuine comments misidentified as spam. The rest go to the spam-grinder.
If you only have a few spam comments to look at, it’s no big deal. I found, however, that I was collecting hundreds of detainees every day. True spammed comments, no question, many involving combinations and contortions that cannot actually be possible for normal human beings.
The Akismet server failure a couple of weeks ago brought all this most acutely home, since some spam comments were leaking through and many others were piling up in the moderation queue.
Which led me to a discovery…
Most of the spammed comments were accruing solely to one post, with another one catching the vast majority of the remainder. The implication was, if I were to turn off commenting in those two posts, I would effectively inoculate BloodhoundBlog from most comment-spam before it even got to Akismet — and without installing a captcha kludge.
Guess what? It worked. I get between five and zero spam comments a day. There is no risk that I’ll scroll past a valid comment in my rush to throw out all that very dirty trash. There are two old posts that won’t take comments — but there is no possibility that they would have gotten any in the first place. Presumably, in due course, some skeezy spambot will penetrate (ew!) another post, so I may have to effect the cure there, too.
Will this work for you? Don’t know. Look at your spam comments and see if there are particular posts that are being gang-raped, as it were. If there are, turning off commenting for those few posts may turn off your comment-spam problem all but completely…
Technorati Tags: blogging
dustin says:
I just checked and I’m seeing the same thing… Most of the spam goes to a few selected posts. I just turned of comments and pings for 6 posts… I’ll be interested to see how many spams Akismet picks up today.
September 8, 2006 — 1:05 pm
Greg Swann says:
Excellent. It’s a work-around, but if it works…
September 8, 2006 — 1:10 pm
Jim Duncan says:
I implemented a plugin, Auto-Close Comments because I found that many of my comment spam were coming in on older posts – so now, after 45 days (if I recall) comments are closed, unfortunately to everybody, but the effort of moderating all the spam was just too time consuming and frankly, irritating. Maybe I could turn it off now that I have Spam Karma and Bad Behavior …
September 8, 2006 — 3:30 pm