Weblog entry #214 for Steve
See all weblog entries made by Steve.
So recently the site has had a few spam problems, which have sucked away my enthusiasm.
Happily I've now updated the site's codebase such that it is easier to retrospectively nuke all comments from an abusive user/IP.
This combined with the filtering applied to incoming comments via the blogspam protection API should mean that things are more likely to stay under control these days.
Please do remember you can click "Report SPAM" next to abusive/spam-ful comments if you're logged into the site. It helps. It does..
Submissions will start to be processed over the next few days and I've even started writing new content myself. Fingers crossed people still visit!
Comments on this Entry
The Perl is Alive site is really plagued with SPAM, I spend a lot of time hitting the "Report SPAM" button on that site. I just wish SPAMMERS would die and leave the rest of us alone...
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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It's always unfortunate when sites are plagued by such things, especially when it should be simple to fix. It just requires time and attention that is rarely found by volunteers.
On this site I find that two articles consistently receive 90% of all SPAM comments. I guess this must be due to their particular popularity and higher rank.
One solution which I was initially tempted by was to merely close comments on articles over 1 year old. I suspect that is actually a sane, sensible, and practical solution - but I don't want to be force into it. If it happens it should be because we all agree that old comments which are significantly out of date need to be re-written, not have endless streams of comments documenting changes.
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It didn't exist when the site was setup, and these days the majority of the captcha's are broken so I see no reason to switch from the one we have..
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I have to say that my time is limited and that without solid numbers, evidence, or similar in advance that I'm unlikely to chance the code just in case it helps. The effort would be better spent elsewhere.
(FWIW we do have some accounts that are created purely to SPAM, but the vast majority of it comes from the Anonymous user, i.e. people that haven't registered.)
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I must admit that most captcha widgets are annoying to use and they don't seem to stop the spam... I'm not sure what the solution is but it's not easy...!
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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1) mod security
2) mod spamhaus
3) mod antiloris
works fine for me.
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TIA
/thorsten
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