Comments on: Evil-Fighting WordPress Plugins

By: GNot

GNot — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 16:41:14 +0000

This is for my own future reference to check whether the comments marked as spam are from comment-spam or trackback-pingback-spam, so to judge if javascript trick works... SPAM from comment-spam:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam' AND comment_type = '';

SPAM from trackback/pingback-spam:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam' AND comment_type <> '';

By: GNot

GNot — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 11:01:53 +0000

Hi Lorelle,
I learned about the hired spammers from your writings, I had no idea that such a phenomenon existed. :-)
Also, I don’t think it’s such a big deal for a commentator to answer a simple math question, eg 1+2. OK I agree that it is annoying having to answer math questions, tick checkboxes etc. The biggest annoyance is captchas. I hate them too, but I understand the bloggers that implement them for protection. :-)

I would say that the main source of spam for my blog is trackback spam. Akismet does a great job, but I think of implementing a plugin specific for trackback spam, so that I don’t have to search through huge lists of “marked as spam” trackbacks in order to check if I should approve them or not.

You are right about the “read and accept” privacy checkbox. Maybe it should be together with the other required fields of the form.

Thanks for your comment :-)

By: Lorelle

Lorelle — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:03:37 +0000

You make a good point against the CAPTCHAs and such. And they do work, but often for not very long. With the growing industry of hiring human comment spammers, CAPTCHAs and tests tend to do more to torture readers than actually help, since human comment spammers can easily bypass these.

The true test of how far we can go to fight off comment spam is by targeting the source. Right now we are in fire fighting mode rather than prevention. As soon as the fire is under control, we need to turn our attention to the source.

Thanks for the kind words and the great work you do helping the WordPress community!

Oh, one more thing. I never see the “read and accept” privacy checkbox until after I hit the submit. It might be wise to move it above the comment box or make it a little bolder since the faded gray is hard to see right off. Thanks.