I was beginning to worry that the link spammers had me down as a spod. Most of the spam (almost always cleared by the magnificent Askimet) has been car related. (And more recently hair related FFS!)
Anyway it seem like the p0rn crowd have finally caught up and the junk is increasing in both quantity and obscenity.
Current stats though seem better than what others have reported:
Comments – real: 2,162, spam:10,869 (on 295 posts)
‘Only’ 80% spam is way better than some folks, who are reporting 95% junk.
I guess the sos stats are going to deteriorate as a new audience of spammers had discovered us.
Is there a simple way to (mass) disable commenting on posts over a certain age in WordPress?
cheers
Simon
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Tuesday, 18th December, 2007 at 1:21 pm |
After adding the Did You Pass Math plug-in to WordPress, my spam slowed to a trickle. You’ll still get some, but probably no where near as much.
Tuesday, 18th December, 2007 at 6:24 pm |
What is about cars that makes someone a spod, may I ask?
Wednesday, 19th December, 2007 at 3:49 pm |
Chris, dunno really, I just remember the kids that were into cars at school were considered slightly more sad than those that were into drink drugs and music. (that was the choice – spend your money on outrageous car insurance and petrol ( and crash repairs) or spend it in the pub)
Tuesday, 30th December, 2008 at 10:41 pm |
Since I too started a blog, I’ve been using a WordPress add-in called Akismet which does a good job of dumping spam.
Tuesday, 30th December, 2008 at 10:42 pm |
I now notice that you just mentioned that. Ahem. As you were…
Wednesday, 31st December, 2008 at 8:41 am |
Hello Simon,
Just see the spam as a compliment, you have an important blog ;-)
The spam will never stop unless people stop clicking on links or making purchases. It is too easy and cheap to send out spam, almost without any consequences. Fortunately there are several methods and tools to reduce the amount of spam.
In the new version of WordPress, 2.7 there is a setting in the “Discussion Settings” in the admin panel. You can automatically close comments on articles older than a certain amount of days.
For more control you can also use the following plugin, with which you can set the amount of days after which comments are disabled. In addition to the default wordpress settings, this plugin also allows to create an exception on popular posts, for example to allow comments to a certains days after the last comment:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comment-timeout/
I’m not sure if you keep the spam comments in your database. I used to do that because I thought some clever wordpress trick would use it as a junk filter, but it doesn’t. You can use some simple SQL code to remove all the spam comments at once:
Count the amount of comment types:
select count(comment_ID), comment_approved from wp_comments group by comment_approved;
Remove all spam comments:
delete from wp_comments where comment_approved = ‘spam’;
Kind regards and all the best for 2009!
Bastien
Wednesday, 31st December, 2008 at 11:19 am |
Thanks Bastien
I spent ages looking for that setting a few months back, but hadn’t bothered recently. I should have guessed they added it with the new UI.
I’m still freeloading on the WP free hosted version. I did start to move it into the codematic world, but its not a high priority.
And now with the latest comments widget on the front page I don’t think I want to block comments for old post. The plug-in sounds like a good compromise. What would be useful would be the option to force moderation after x days after post or comment. It probably exists already.
Wednesday, 31st December, 2008 at 1:04 pm |
Amusing that you listed “Tight jean babes” in your top X posts, and suddenly it attracts more comments than when it initially was posted. Wonder why?
(Note: I was initially tempted by the topic, then realizing it was Simon’s blog, decided it wouldn’t be too interesting.)
Wednesday, 31st December, 2008 at 1:30 pm |
Jon
yeah it is a bit self fullfilling
“then realizing it was Simon’s blog, decided it wouldn’t be too interesting”
)ouch!(
Wednesday, 31st December, 2008 at 7:08 pm |
Simon –
I meant interesting compared to, say, actual tight jean babes, which would not be safe for this kind of blog.