Ben Michael Ward is a Web Developer in San Francisco.

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Gatekeeping Akismet

It seems that the effectiveness of Akismet for comment spam protection is starting to wane. It still catches huge amounts of spam (need to clear another 1600 spam comments from my cache in Wordpress after I write this) but slowly but surely spam comments are sneaking in.

It seems that spammers are learning that cramming a post with dozens of hyperlinks will always bounce back, so they’re increasingly settling for comments that contain no additional links, and simply inserting their spam URL into the website field. It seems that the random comment content is just too obscure for Akismet to detect.

My attempted solution has been to deploy Eric Meyer’s GateKeeper plug-in and I’m afraid you’ll now need to tick a box whenever you leave a comment. I’ve made it as unobtrusive as I can (using a checkbox rather than a text field).

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3 Responses to “Gatekeeping Akismet”

  1. Comment by paul haine

    July 28th, 2006 at 6:52 pm

    I upgraded Joeblade recently, and in doing so didn’t have time to re-implement my home-grown version of the GateKeeper plugin – figured I’d give Akismet a go, and so far I’ve been really impressed, and also astonised by how much comment spam I’ve been getting all this time – hundreds a day, in fact.

    So far only one has gotten through…eventually I expect I’ll have to go back to the GateKeeper-way of filtering, but for now it’s holding up for me.

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  2. Comment by Ben

    July 29th, 2006 at 5:13 pm

    Akismet was ace for me since it first launched so I’ve had a good run. It’s now caught nearly 10,000 spam comments. On a blog with 500 legitimate comments, that’s huge and I’m really glad to have it. Certainly I prefer it to closing comments on old posts, which I’m generally against.

    The hope is that Gatekeeper will do enough to keep the number that reaches Akismet down and I’ll start making some use of the Wordpress keywords list as well to force stuff into the moderation queue.

    I’m a bit saddened that I have to think about spam again though, for a long time Akismet has let me pretend it wasn’t there. The Akismet stats page reckons that 94% of all comments are spam. The world is a sorry place sometimes.

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    July 8th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

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