Begone evil spam!

Just three days after installing WordPress my blog has been spammed — I guess that shows how quickly the blog is integrated into bigger blogging community thank to the links from Janus and Kristian and the automatic pinging of several other sites by Ping-O-Matic.

So the world is tuned in… that’s all very well if it weren’t for those pesky spammers! I’ve had seven spam comments already, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop. But with help from Spam Karma I hope to get rid of them. It checks the comment in several ways and deletes it if it determines that it is definite spam. Good comments are let through immediatedly. Comments where Spam Karma is in doubt will be subjected to a captcha test where you have to recognize some letters in an image. That is a really cool feature which should ensure that no automated program can post comments, while still allowing access to real people.

Provided that the commenter gave a valid email address when submitting the comment, he or she can also verify themselves using that. That also means that people with bad sight can get their comments approved even if they cannot use the captcha test.

4 Comments

  1. Janus:

    Hehe … and the first comment on this entry is spam. I receive loads of it as well. Is just a very sad fact when you live on the Internet.

  2. Martin:

    Yes, you’re right that spam is a fact of life on the Internet, but I’m used to having tools dealing with it in an efficient manner: with Spamassassin and ClamAV I see very little spam in my inbox. Judging from the description of Spam Karma I expected something similar, but it doesn’t seem to be working at all. I’ll have to look into it some more.

  3. Janus:

    Seems like you have not activated it or something. I did not need to do anything new to post a comment… (Oh, nevermind… now I do)

  4. Martin:

    Ha! This morning I found six comments trapped by Spam Karma! So it’s working now, after I set it to be “Strict”.

    I’m still not quite sure of how Spam Karma decides which comments is spam and which are not, but it seems that being logged in helps getting by it without having to go through any moderation.

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