[Techtalk] Blog spam

[Elwing]

I use Kitten's Friendly comments for Wordpress 
(http://mookitty.co.uk/devblog/category/kittens-friendly-comments/)
but I'm sure you can implement something similar.

If the writer has previously posted something to your comments, they're 
added to your whitelist.  Anyone else gets moderated (meaning, you have 
to approve the comment).  Once you've approved someone, they're added to 
your whitelist.
You can manually edit your whitelist as well, and add or remove people.

It works decently well for me, and it's only a minor annoyance (there 
aren't that many people that post comments to my weblog.

I'm waiting for trackback spam - which'll get a crapload of blogging 
tools, since they all implement it in pretty much the same way.

Elwing


Teri Solow wrote:
> Recently, my blog has begun getting inundated with comment spam.  I've
> poked around a bit, trying to research the best way to counteract this,
> but it doesn't seem like an easy thing to do.  Hence, I was wondering if
> anyone else could offer any experience/opinions on the matter.
> 
> First off, I'll say right now that I'm not using MT or anything similar
> that may already have plugins made to do this.  The blogging software I
> use is called PSG (Project Steve Guttenberg,
> http://projectsteveguttenberg.org/), which I am a contributer to (as
> such, I'll probably try to make whatever solution I end up using
> available to others, if possible).
> 
> Secondly, I know I _don't_ want to set up one of those "enter the
> characters in the below image' checkpoints, as I know that it is not
> compatible with everyone (e.g. the handicapped).
> 
> What I _am_ looking for is something like spamassassin, only simpler.
> Basically just a simple script which the contents of the comment will be
> piped through, whos return code will indicate whether or not (or the
> likelihood of) the comment is spam.
> 
> From the googling I've done on the matter, it seems like I can't
> actually use spamassassin because it relies too heavily on the contents
> of message headers (of which there will be none).  A friend suggested
> that I package up a crippled version of spamassassin with all of those
> checks disabled, but I think that will be bulky and suboptimal for use
> in a plugin I intend to make public.
> 
> On a similar note, though I believe Bayesian filters are nice, I don't
> think they would be useful here either.  It takes quite a bit of ham and
> spam to train a filter properly and I doubt that most users trying to
> cut down on comment spam would have the time, knowledge, or patience to
> devote to setting up and maintaining such a plugin.
> 
> Of course, this leaves me with very little to go on.  Simple regular
> expression searches are a major kludge, but they may just be the only
> thing that will require little user effort to get going.  Something like
> MT-blacklist would be perfect, but as I already said, this isn't MT.  Of
> course, writing a plugin that USES the MT-blacklist blacklist may be
> gernally useful... any thoughts on this?
> 
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