Migrated to mephisto and learning about spam protection
February 9th, 2007
Liverail is back!
And now running on mephisto with a bit of a redesign based on the theme Pinder. I’m going to update the design in a few days but it is looking lots better so far.
Mephisto is helping with with my Spam problem, its Akismet is picking out nearly all the spam but letting good comments through and it is much easier to deal with deleting the akismet picked spam.
I’ve learned a bit about blog Spam problems.
Things that work.
Turn on Akismet.
Any good blogging system should have Akismet integration now and getting an API key is free for personal use.
Disable Comments in a month.
One of the surest ways of dealing with any spam is to disallow comments a month after the article was published. This is a common setting in most blog software and helps because by the time the spam spiders find it, it’s all too late. It causes problems with long running articles of interest such as my Flex and RoR tutorials but it’s a worthy price to pay.
Don’t let the spamming start.
You should think about spamming from day one, even though I didn’t get a spam problem until over a year after my blog started, most spam spiders will test your blog for suitability with a test comment. If it can then read it on your blog it will hit you with its full spam might. Don’t let them start.
Captcha.
If your blogging engine supports it, turn it on. It will stop nearly all spam and anyone who can’t be bothered to fill it in, isn’t really too bothered about commenting anyways
And some things that don’t work.
Maintaining your own blacklists.
You’ll never keep up and the spammers are too clever. Use Akismet instead.
Relying on AJAX comments to protect you.
It’s a myth that most spam spiders don’t know about AJAX comments and this will protect you against spam. They wised up to this pretty quick.