Canned Meat
Nee Naw has been drowning in spam these last few days, and despite having numerous filters in place, I’m still wasting inordinate amounts of time deleting comments. Therefore, I have changed settings so that you will find your comments are held in a moderation queue unless you have a previously approved comment. Sorry for any inconvenience, blah blah blah.
And BOG OFF to spammers!!
Edit. Got two of the plug-ins suggested, and they seem to be working a treat. Please let me know if you have any problems posting real comments! Thanks everyone.
on May 19th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/72930?replies=1
That’ll help!
on May 19th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
‘Previously approved comment’? Too much time spent reading government sponsered memoranda I think.
on May 19th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Could you not get one of those gizmo’s where you have to type in the messed up letters in the picture? Would that not help? T
on May 19th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Those “gizmos” are easy to work around as they tend not to be that smart, and unless done very well are hugely discriminating against partially sighted blogviewers unless you offer an audible alternative, which would require a lot of server side processor power, and storage.
Basically unless Mark wants to invest a few £1000, or stop using word press those “gizmo” things are far too crude for his purpose.
(on a sidenote: I wonder if any of my previous comments were “approved”.
on May 19th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
There’s a Wordpress plugin called Spam Karma 2 that works pretty well at stopping spam automatically.
on May 19th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Automattic (The people behind Wordpress) offer a service called Akismet:
(Quote from the site)
“If you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, you’ve probably experienced how spammers can suck the joy out of managing your blog, and some people spend more time deleting junk than they actually do creating content. Akismet is our way to address this. It’s an adaptive, self-learning spam protection service that has proven highly effective, blocking tens of thousands of spams a day with a 0.001% miss rate.”
Basically when people submit comments, they are checked by Akismet; if they pass they get added, if they fail they get saved for 15 days so you can check.
To top it all it is FREE for personal use (i.e. not making more than $500 per month from your blog). Give it a go!
It is avalable at http://akismet.com/
on May 19th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Oh yeah, if you are making over $500 a month, or just want a “pro” key, it is $5 a month.
Enjoy!
on May 19th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
Cheers for all your tips - I’ll look into these plug ins etc after a good night’s sleep. Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon!
on May 20th, 2006 at 7:54 am
There’s another one that I found worked very well - spam poison:
http://english-57100356181.spampoison.com/
I used to get about 20+ a day, I still get a few, but it’s much more managable with Vosene. er… Spam Poison.
on May 20th, 2006 at 11:00 am
And there is Bad Behavior:
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/
Allthough not as good as Askimet or Spam Karma, so I have heard.
It tries to block all spambots, or any bot that does not obey robots.txt, OR any web browser that does not ‘identify’ itself correctly, with a 412 Precondition Failed error.
As it analyses the agent (bot or browser) and NOT the comment, it can sometimes block legit users from accessing your site if they have a non-standard setup.
It can be used in conjunction with other anti-comment spam solutions (i.e. Askimet, Spam Karma etc).
on May 20th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
hi mark,
i’m still reading faithfully…just wondering (this really isn’t the place to post this but it will do) what are your hours like? how do your shifts operate? silly questions i know, but wondering if they’re like our fire shifts here in nz? we do 2 days and then 2 nights starting every 8 days…
on May 21st, 2006 at 11:02 am
kjc - our rota is exceedingly complicated. It goes like this:
D D D D x x x
N N N N x x x
x x x x N N N
x x x x D D D
? ? ? ? ? x x
D = 7am - 7pm
N = 7pm - 7am
x = day off
? = relief week - we have to do two or three shifts between Monday to Friday
on May 21st, 2006 at 11:37 am
Yes, I had to start monitoring too. I guess the crazies are targeting us now for their gartification. It’s funny, but I haven’t had to dump one comment since the monitoring started.
on July 5th, 2006 at 5:57 am
Hi, this blog’s been giving me quite a laugh… people do some stupid things sometimes. Of course having an accident isn’t stupid and I’m glad there’s people like you all over the world to mop up when things go pear shaped. I don’t understand football hooligans though…