I am not admitting defeat, though I will admit that I have taken a beating in the spam arena with SicklesInsight. I swear the number of incoming spam attacks doubles each week - and this becomes quite a task to handle. In past weeks I’ve enabled Akismet Comment Spam Killer which is a plugin included with wordpress (at least it was at the time that I installed it). This has alleviated some of the experienced symptoms, though I’m not holding my breath on the longevity of its effectiveness.
To date, the measures taken to counter spam have been behind the scenes and have not in any way affected the commenting party at all. If the spam seaps past the blockades put in place today, my next step will have to be asking a challenge question to each comment submitted. John Chow found a plugin he recently highlighted that does the job with a question or questions of your choice instead of asking you to read a box with barely legible letters and numbers (at least I think that is whats in the box). He also includes some additional mods that make the plugin even better! The full story can be found here.
Additional recommendations from several resources suggest denying access to a blacklist of users through your .htaccess file with the theory that this will eliminate the countless tor proxies accessing your site for the purposes of spam. Makes sense, this will be among my final steps prior to asking you to answer a question every time you wish to leave a comment.
For now, I leave you with this corny joke:
Q: What do you call a spammer wearing a suit and tie?
A: The Defendant.
Eh, making a blacklist seems like a great solution, but it didn’t work for me and is quite time consuming. I mean, sure, it eliminates some, but they come from so many different IPs and referrers that it’s hard to blacklist them all. At least you have Wordpress to filter out your spam. My poor handmade blog has nothing, and I haven’t deemed it worthy of the time to make the effort to do much (except block IPs and certain keywords, and as I mentioned earlier, that doesn’t work so well). I’ll probably end up redoing my site one day and get rid of the blog part of it completely. That site is so ugly and outdated . . .
A question would be fun! But just don’t make it too hard like those stupid captcha . . . catchpa . . . capch . . . c . . . was I right the first time? I could look it up. But I’m lazy and tired and it’s late and I CAN’T SLEEP!
Hey now, not all blogs are “ugly” or “outdated”. My blog takes offense to your comment.
For those of you that thought Becky might be sneezing up top, CAPTCHA is an acronym for such spam avoiding techniques. No doubt you’ve seen the box with skewed letters and numbers that you need to translate into a text box before you can make an order from your favorite online junkie or reset the password to your porn site. This mechanism is defined as follows:
“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”
Obviously, much easier stated as CAPTCHA.
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