I’m making a minor tweak in the comments system for this site. For some reason, the amount of comment spam this site is getting is exploding – 2000 spam comments in the first four days of June, versus 4900 for all of May, and only 1750 for all of June 2008. Akismet is catching 99.8% of them, but it’s still putting unneeded strain on the server. The usual pattern is for one older post to get dozens, if not hundreds, of spam comments submitted; the spammer is too stupid to to check if any of his previous comments are approved before posting another one. For these targeted posts, comments and pingbacks will be disabled, at least temporarily. So far, less than 10 posts (out of 600+) have had comments disabled, so it’s unlikely you’ll ever be impacted. New posts will always start out open for comments, and if you want to comment on a post that’s had comments blocked, just drop me a line and I’ll unblock it for you.
"This site" searches Free Geography Tools; "Web" searches the Internet using Google.
Testing Testing 123…
Did this SPAM comment make it through?
I had the same problem. Can take quite a while to validate a real comment vs SPAM when you’re getting that many!
Saw this, hope it helps.
Cheers.
http://www.ghacks.net/2009/06/15/free-anti-spam-plugin-antispam-bee-for-wordpress/
Thanks for the link. I’m a little nervous about the fact that AntiSpamBee doesn’t say anything about the algorithm they use for detecting spam, but I may give this a try shortly.
Oddly enough, just putting a message above the comment form telling potential spammers what I’m doing drastically reduced the amount of spam.
I see the same thing on my blog ( though I haven’t updated it in, well, forever in internet time ). It’s almost always a single, very old post, that attracts the spammers like a plague of locusts. And once they’ve got a url in their sites, I haven’t found a way to stop them. Like you, I see that they aren’t deterred by previous comments not being published. I’m certain these are software “bots” out to drop links … the persistent nature of the “attack” gives this away, and it seems like going after older posts is a strategy to fly under the radar. ( Not a good strategy, mind you… )
I think WordPress has a feature to automatically disable comments on older posts, but, especially with a blog that’s almost encyclopedic in nature ( ie yours ), this could be a very bad idea. Informative posts you wrote a year ago are likely to be relevant to human readers who are getting themselves up to speed on this stuff…
How is the recaptcha software working out?