Massive comment spam problem solved
Posted on Nov 7, 2007 in Security, Wordpress
Over the last couple of weeks, I have noticed an increase in my comment spam that has been caught by Akismet. Now, I’m not a super blogger getting thousands of comments a day, so I’m talking about getting over 400 comment spam in the last two weeks.
Comment spam can be annoying, but I can tell you I wouldn’t get rid of my Akismet for anything after this episode.
I have noticed an increase in my comment spam over the last two months, with the most dramatic increase coming in the last two weeks. It wasn’t much for me to get 4 or 5 comment spam trapped each day, so life was good. The last couple of weeks have really sucked for me, as I was getting 25 or 30 comment spam in a day.
That might not seem like a lot, but I also found a few comments in there that were false positives by the Akismet system. I was able to recover those easily, which is another good reason to check your Akismet logs.
What I found was I was receiving a ton of the comment spam from one post. I’m not sure how the spammers work, but I can only guess that somehow they found the page and it made it into their spam box and it was shared with tons of other spammers out there. I was getting all sorts of stuff, from blank comments to lists a mile long promising me that there were numerous women anxiously awaiting to service my every need. Huh, I guess they are gonna cut my grass and wax the car! Sweet…
Since the post was an older one that hadn’t received much traffic, all I needed to do, and did was go and turn off the comments and pings under the “Discussion” tab for that particular article. I used the integrated feature in the Akismet Spam section of the comments tab in the Wordpress administration panel. Just hover or click on the “view post” link and you will see which one is causing you a lot of problems.
After I turned off the comments and pings on that older post, hopefully the spam servers are choking on the fact that they can’t send me any more seductive offers or risk free methods to increase my “manhood” size.
All I can say is I’m not sure why that one post was targeted, but it was, and I hope you can find it useful to try this method to cut down on your comment spam.
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I get about 20 spam comments a day and if not because of Akismet, I could have spend more time to actually browse through my comments one by one to clear out all those spams.
I have came across many funny comments as well, from weight loss to the “girls service”. Some even have their e-mail or messenger address included. Of course, I also looked through the list since there will be some good bunch which got trapped.
I think Akismet is the King of all plugins.
I also agree with you Wayne. Without Akismet, I’m sure I would be going crazy every day! Just image trying to go through each post’s comment section and pulling out that spam…that would really, well, suck!