Blog spam is a pain. It wastes your time, your bandwidth and storage space. Kyle asked today on Twitter for some advice on how to reduce spam loads. Here are some plugins and code I’ve used to reduce spam on my blogs.
Akismet
This plug-in does a very nice job of marking spam and is set-it-and-forget-it easy. You’ll need a WordPress API key and installation and setup is a snap. Akismet will quarantine comments and trackback pings in a special area so that you can either mass delete them or go through them and check for false positives. I’ve seen some false-positives on trackbacks. You can use Akismet with WordPress as well as several other systems, including Movable Type.
Bad Behavior
A great way to stop bots from spamming you is to not even let them on your site. Bad Behavior does just that. If you don’t use WordPress, you can still integrate the code with your PHP-based web app. I once got blocked from visiting a site by BB because I was using a Playstation3. I think BB didn’t like my user-agent.
ReCaptcha
ReCaptcha is a cool project out of CMU. I’ve been meaning to do a whole post on it, but I use it at my institution to reduce spam and it works great. Bad people stay out and as a byproduct, books are being digitized. You can learn more about there here. There is a WordPress plugin as well, as well as resources for a large number of other content systems and programming languages.
Spam Firewall
One of the issues with Movable Type is that everything runs as a CGI process. This means if your blog or site runs MT, and you have open comments, your mt-comments.cgi script is going to be slammed. This means higher loads on your server, which in turn can lead to degraded performance, and worse, if your site is hosted in a shared environment, can get your blog turned off. My MT scripts are constantly getting killed at Dreamhost. Spam Firewall serves as a gate-keeper for your mt-comments.cgi script by trying to thwart off would-be intruders before they even get in. This plugin is only for PHP-based installs.
I hope this helps you reduce the spam on your blog.
Mike,
Great post, just a day to late!
On another note I’m not seeing anything in the awaiting moderation bin since installing Bad Behavior. That one is definitely a winner! Thanks!
The issue with Bad Behavior and the PS3 has been fixed. The site you visited should update to the latest version.