Cornell Finch

Spam Spam Spam Spam

One of the funniest sketches by Monty Python that I remember, this is about something completely different…

There’s been quite a bit of conversation at various places about the amount of spam arriving at Wordpress blogs just recently.

Eric mentions that he’s had to turn on comment moderation. Dave, in his comments, says

I want to wage a clandestine war against all the spammers, con-artists and child pornographers and bring them down.

Nothing short of seeing them in prison or physically making their computers explode in their faces, causing massive mutilation will suffice.

And it’s mentioned on the wordpress.com forums today too.

I had myself noticed there was an increase in the amount of spam hitting this site. I have just cleared the Akismet cache of 455 (yes, four hundred and fifty five) spam comments and 35 spam comments caught in the moderation queue. That’s since Monday. Today is Wednesday. I’m going to keep a close eye on if it gets worse before it gets better.

In the meantime, if you haven’t got it, get Akismet (in fact if you haven’t got it, upgrade your wordpress!), get the Spam Karma and bad behaviour plugins and activate them. If any still get through straight to the blog (which is at the end of the day what the spammers want) then turn on comment moderation for all comments.

Lorelle talks lots about combatting spam and Podz made a great post on the wp.org support forum on the same subject.

UPDATE: Apparently Akismet went down which would mean that the spam killer on most people’s blogs wouldn’t have been properly active.

The benefit of a centralized system like Akismet is everyone benefits from the collective intelligence of every user, we’re all unified in the fight together, but the point of vulnerability is always downtime.