Wordpress Plugins

Diet Spam!

8 Comments

Wow! Blog posts with the word “diet” in them really bring out the trackback spam. When I visited my spamfolder, it looked like this:

Notice a common theme?

Trackback spam is done by other blogs (called “spam blogs” or “splogs”). It’s not added in the “comment” field. Akismet (a spam filter) invariably catches these and puts them in the spam folder. Right now, trackback spam and a few “mistakes” when Akismet throws a false positive are the only thing getting into the spam folder.

This is a big change from Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. As some of you know, I installed the NoSpamNX plugin; it’s is doing a stellar job on comment spam. NoSpamNX acts as a “pre-filter” in front of all the other spam filters, and wow! It’s great.

A bunch of you guys tried to “trick” it into thinking you were spammers, but NoSpamNX has no false positives. That’s because it works by adding hidden fields to the comment form. The spambots often try to fill or modify any and all fields– hidden or not. When a comment with a filled, or changed, hidden field is detected, NoSpamNX deletes it. It’s worked great. Akismet is being given a big rest because NoSpamNX seems to catch all the spambot spam. I mean all. Pretty dang cool!

If your blog is being bombarded, and you find the spam folder filling inconvenient, go add “NoSpamNX” to your plugins. It’s a great compliment to Akismet (which also works very well.)

8 thoughts on “Diet Spam!”

  1. Which reminds me: Lucia, do you have any good recipes for Spam? And is there a diet Spam available. I went through a (short)period in graduate school when it was Spam,Spam,Spam and more Spam.

  4. While I’m sure that Akismet appreciates your compliment, I think it would consider NoSpamNX a complement to it.

    Aha! No one expects the Grammar Inquisition! Get the comfy chair!

  5. I’ve been using wp-hashcash for years. I might get one spam a day entered by a real person from a real browser. Might be a bit heavy for a popular blog. I’m not aware of false positives (because they can’t complain in the comments that they got blocked. Just in case you need a testimonial.

  6. Oooh! Sweet! I never thought of having a “spam bait” hidden field. I don’t use WordPress or its plug-ins, but I can easily adapt the online forms that I do write to introduce this level of protection.

    Spam bots may get sensitive to, and thus avoid altering, hidden fields later so I think I’ll probably pre-empt this with a standard form field in a DIV with a CSS class with properties to hide it from view. The net result will be the same; the form field will be invisible to the user but the spam bot (unless it gets REALLY smart) will perceive the field as in plain view, and will likely fill it.

    Many thanks for the inspiration, Lucia!

  7. Cecil–
    Does Hashcash work with Akismet? Do you get trackback spam? I think the only problem with hashcash is people who might not have javascript enabled. NOSpamNX doesn’t use javascript.

    Simon– Download the plugin and read the NOSpamNX code. You’ll see he has 3 extra hidden fields.

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