A fair amount of comment spam is getting through my current spam filter. Besides the annoyance factor, dealing with this issue is starting to waste way too much time. So, in the next day or two I’m going to reactivate Akismet, a highly effective spam filter.
That plug-in has throttled FaM in the past. Akismet has issued a couple of updates since I deactivated it, so I hope the problem has resolved itself. But there’s a chance it will take FaM down, and if so, it may require some time to get BlueHost on the phone to fix it.
So if you drop by and get an error message or some such, don’t give up. Come back later—the problem will be temporary.
my askimet says it’s blocked over 11k spam comments since i fired it up so hopefully it’ll help you out too. mrs micah also told me about wp-spam free which catches most of what askimet still misses.
@ Carrie: Apparently you can run them both at once. Since I’m not sure how much staff BlueHost will have working today, I’m thinking I should wait until tomorrow, just in case tech help needs to ride to the rescue.
WP-spam free is catching most of the stuff. The problem has been messages that are directly or peripherally relevant to a post’s content. These sometimes appear to respond directly to the post (though I think they’re well-crafted machine-generated blurbs) but include a link to some loan shark or quack diet nostrum. Or the like. At first it was just a few, but now a LOT are coming through, mostly from spoof ISPs. Blacklisting the ISP doesn’t work.
Also, you can’t really tell whether a rather vanilla comment that’s on-topic is from a real person or whether it’s designed to get past the spam catcher so that subsequent ads will just get posted automatically. So at this point I’m trashing comments that might be OK unless the commenter makes specific, detailed reference to the post’s contents. That means I may be losing readers because of this stuff!
yeah i’m pretty much doing the same things with comments that are generic in content :/
I won’t approve any unless they are specifically on topic for the post, and they also have to be from a real site. Even if they are spot on topic, say about my post where I wrote about tires, if their email and website is uisjeisl@tire_fixers.com I won’t approve it. I can pretty much tell they aren’t real readers, they are just trying to get link juice and spam me. It really drives me batty when they say how much they loved this post and how they are looking forward to reading all the great things I have to say and it’s my monthly thank you to my top referrers. Grrrr! Akismet does pretty good, but I have noticed it doesn’t like Mr. Credit Card for whatever reason. Thankfully he knows I’m not trying to dump his comments and he’ll write and say he commented yet again. 😉 Oh, and if your readers are authentic, they will hopefully email you and ask about the comment they left. I have done that a couple of times and actually ended up becoming good friends with the blogger.
The local genius computer kid I hire occassionally has put in Adwatch and Adaware and I haven’t had spam since. I think it’s free, but not being a geek, and not sure.