Over the last few months the amount of spam comments I have been getting on this site has increased significantly.
The Akismet anti-spam plugin does a great job of detecting this spam, but it still leaves me the job of scanning all the spam messages in case a comment has been detected as spam in error.
To try and curb this spam I have now installed an additional layer of spam protection. Anybody wishing to comment on this site will now need to answer a simple maths question before the comment is accepted. Hopefully this will block spambots in their tracks. Any registered users who are logged in will not need to answer this maths question.
It will be interesting to see what effect this has on my spam stats. I’ll report back with the results in a couple of weeks.
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Dean // Feb 11, 2007 at 9:10 am
Update: It’s been 2 days since I installed this plugin and not a single spam message. Wow! Just goes to prove that it was spambots hitting my site.
2 John H // Feb 12, 2007 at 6:49 pm
That’s pretty impressive results for such a simple technique. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid the spambots so far, but I have my doubts about how good my blogging system (Typo) would be at resisting them. Mind you, I haven’t come across any blogging system that’s completely immune to spambots. Anyway, should the worst happen, I might have a go at implementing something similar to this in Ruby.
3 Garth // Feb 15, 2007 at 11:04 am
The works great for me. The only issue I have now is an increase in trackback spam. I’ve added all the common words used by spam in the wordpress anti-spam area. I hope that keeps most of it at bay.
4 Math Comment Spam Protection Update // Mar 6, 2007 at 9:48 pm
[...] been almost a month now since I installed the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin so time for the [...]
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