I’m trying out yet ANOTHER anti comment-spam plugin
Well, one thing I like about Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer already is that it does NOT mess with comment moderation like every other anti comment spam plugin I tried did. Comments that are from posters who have not posted before (and are humans filling in the form the old fashioned way) go into moderation, which is as it should be. I do hope he releases the new version though since I really don’t like the permissioning required to run this pup.
I activated it earlier today. A couple spams have come through but it seems to have cut the volume considerably. Of course the overnight hours will be the acid test. I’ll report in on this tomorrow.
What I can’t figure out is why the “brains” at WordPress don’t deal with this in core. From all the reading I’ve done on this issue it can be done. Textpattern has almost no problems with this issue. Movable Type, while slightly more problematical, doesn’t have NEARLY the problems with it that WordPress does. PC Mike says his comment spam quintupled or more when we moved his blog over from typepad to WP.
Don’t even TALK to me about getting an api registration number to use Akismet, which, from what I hear, is a problem plugin anyway, since reports have it that there are more false positives and false negatives than there are REAL and true returns. The fact that it’s a plugin and not part of core is bass ackwards and typical Mullenweig thinking, I’m sure, though maybe it’s better that it is a plugin since it seems to be screwing things up. He’s probably considering charging for it, once it has a “loyal” following. He’ll have to do a lot better than he’s doing to gather that following though. Everyone I know who has used it has told me not to bother.
[tags]Comment Spam, Referrer, Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer, WordPress PlugIn[/tags]
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Hm. Now that I’m going through your archives here, I think I have a few more comments.
Aside from being the author of Bad Behavior, which you said is working pretty well for you, I also had a hand in the Akismet plugin (but not the backend; I make no money from it). I can also tell you that Matt’s spoken extensively about how Akismet will be funded, and it won’t be from your typical bloggers who are just trying to keep their own personal sites free of spam.
As for false positives, yes, it does have a few. So does virtually every other anti-spam solution out there. My approach to false positives is a bit different: In cases where I can’t be reasonably sure that the HTTP request is malicious or spammy, I let it go through. As a result, I estimate that I’m seeing about one false positive per 100,000 requests.
And to deal with that, Bad Behavior 2 includes a set of technical support pages displayed to people who might receive false positives that instruct them on how to fix the problem from their end (e.g. remove viruses/spyware, fix the proxy server, etc).
On the downside, I could block 100% of spam, but I would have a far higher rate of false positives. So I settle for 99%. In the case of my own blog, for one week, it was 4,200 blocked requests, versus 23 spams that made it through.
I always recommend defense in depth, and with Bad Behavior installed, using Akismet is far less annoying; it’s much easier to find the one false positive among the 24 comments that Akismet caught during that week, as it would be from over 4,200 spams.
And that’s why I recommend using Bad Behavior in addition to Akismet. If Matt ever started charging bloggers for Akismet, my recommendation might change, but that’s where I stand for now.
May 26th, 2006 at 10:45 am
Have you tried Akismet that comes with WordPress 2? Not perfect , but better than waves of Spam.
Paul , Technology in Plain English
May 26th, 2006 at 11:03 am
I installed Bad Behavior, which seems to be handling around 95% of it.
Akismet, according to a lot of my friends, has as many false positives and false negatives as real returns.