After switching from BadBehavior+Spam.module back to Akismet, I assumed I’d be in for a bit of an onslaught of spam. I was braced for impact. I can’t believe the sheer volume of sustained attempted spam comments that are constantly being flung against this blog, 24/7 now. It’s peaked at several attempts per second, which was adding a bit of a load to the server as it struggled to thwart the forces of evil.
Shortly after switching to Akismet, and enabling the experimental spam detection, I was seeing this:
Now, that might not look like much, but it suggests that Akismet was having to reject attempts several times per minute. Fast forward 24 hours, and I see this:
Again, not looking like much, but the interval between Akismet interventions is getting longer. Either the spammers are slowly starting to give up, or this is just a natural lull. I mean, there can be several minutes now without an attempted spamment posting. Entire minutes!
Now, the downside of Akismet is that I can’t use it on any of my campus projects. The cost of licensing Akismet for the number of sites we have would be prohibitive, given our budget asymptotically approaching zero dollars (CDN).
After switching from BadBehavior+Spam.module back to Akismet, I assumed I’d be in for a bit of an onslaught of spam. I was braced for impact. I can’t believe the sheer volume of sustained attempted spam comments that are constantly being flung against this blog, 24/7 now. It’s peaked at several attempts per second, which was adding a bit of a load to the server as it struggled to thwart the forces of evil.
Shortly after switching to Akismet, and enabling the experimental spam detection, I was seeing this:
Now, that might not look like much, but it suggests that Akismet was having to reject attempts several times per minute. Fast forward 24 hours, and I see this:
Again, not looking like much, but the interval between Akismet interventions is getting longer. Either the spammers are slowly starting to give up, or this is just a natural lull. I mean, there can be several minutes now without an attempted spamment posting. Entire minutes!
Now, the downside of Akismet is that I can’t use it on any of my campus projects. The cost of licensing Akismet for the number of sites we have would be prohibitive, given our budget asymptotically approaching zero dollars (CDN).
Related
Hi I found your site and want to draw your attention to this technique:
According to Madd0’s blog, most spammers on his site arrive with a blank (empty) user-agent string. He further proposes to add a redirection to the .htaccess file to redirect blank user-agent browsers to 404 page:
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
# Redirect empty user agents to Access denied
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule . – [F]
Perhaps this could block some spammers.
Via
[Interesting spammer pattern – how they find sites]
The problem with Akismet is that it and their users easily and wrongfully blacklists countless of domains of which doesn’t deserve the permanent life time ban. Akismet has become a new sort of Internet police that can easily be used to black list ones competitors.
The fact is that it doesn’t take much to get on this ban list, and when some blog owner has decided that you belong there? Well there isn’t anything that you can do. Akismet won’t answer your requests. It’s a complete missuse of power from bottom to top.
In my view, Akismet has the same status as all the crappy spam filters we see in email accounts. You still have to treat the spam folder as your inbox. Important mails end up in the spam folder every other day. What’s the point of a spam folder when you still have to treat it as an inbox and sort through all those mails in order to not miss any wanted mails?
The same applies to Akismet. Even on the local level the blog owners doesn’t have any power to white list a domain. What I mean is as simple as follows. If a blog owner finds a comment in the spam folder which he doesn’t think belong there and white list it, the domain will still be black listed even on the local level. So the next time that person comments on the blog it will still count as spam, even though the owner has explicitly marked it as okay on his blog.