Well, I got an anti comment spam plugin that seems to be working.
And despite rumors that it sometimes has that effect, Bad Behavior hasn’t melted down my host’s server, nor have I gotten any Montastic notices about server outages. Bad Behavior isn’t blocking 100%, but it is down to around 5 a day, from the over 100 it was, so that’s definitely a huge improvement.
I’m still trying to figure out why, if there’s a nofollow attribute added to all outbound links on my blog, they want to spam me. There is NOTHING in it for them, nobody who surfs my blog is likely to click a spam link even if one were to make it through,and NONE of my googly goodness is passed on. Idiots and assholes, wasting their and my bandwidth for absolutely NO good reason.
[tags]comment spam, bad behavior, wordpress plugin[/tags]
May 22nd, 2006 at 2:08 pm
I’m still working on the other 5%.
As for server load, Bad Behavior is explicitly designed to reduce server load by detecting and blocking malicious activity as early as possible, before the blog starts doing its heavy database lifting, and by loading as little of itself as necessary to actually accomplish its task. This is why it’s split into multiple small files. The next generation of Bad Behavior is (so far) slightly smaller and quite a bit faster.
Oh, and nofollow doesn’t work. In fact, it’s only made blog spam worse. Hm, I should update that post, since it’s been a year tomorrow since I wrote it, and things are definitely getting much worse…
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Shawn of Comptrio.com hosts one of my clients, pcmike.com. Mike Wendland is an NBC-TV reporter and Detroit Free Press columnist with a HUGE following and a correspondingly HUGE amount of site traffic. There were a lot of problems with Mike running bad behavior. I don’t know the details, but I’m sure Shawn would fill you in, if he hasn’t already. If you could address the problems and get it working on Mike’s blog I’m sure Mike would be eternally grateful. I never even knew what comment spam was until Mike linked to ME. Now I and everybody I’ve ever linked to is inundated with it. And you are very right about it getting MUCH worse recently.
The server meltdown comment was based on the experience Shawn had in trying to figure out what was happening with Mike’s hosting account, which was experiencing downtime because of it. It made me hesitant to try bad behavior for that reason, but after being recommended to it by many other people, I tried it anyway. I’m glad I did.
The nofollow article was interesting, and I think you’re probably right about its lack of effectiveness, and maybe even its harmfulness. One of your links to no-nofollow plugins was busted though.
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:40 pm
I’ve gone through my email box and I can’t find any trouble reports from Shawn, Mike, the Detroit Free Press, or anything that seems related. In any case, I can’t do anything for him, since he seems to be on TypePad (maybe because of his hosting issues?).
Bad Behavior has been used on very high traffic sites, such as wordpress.com, with no trouble at all. The Wall Street Journal uses it on its blog, again without complaint. So while I might be able to help figure out what caused the server to crash and burn, I don’t really suspect Bad Behavior of being involved.
May 22nd, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Wow, Mike must have made the switch back to typepad pretty recently. I installed a podcast plugin for him not much more than two weeks ago on the wordpress version. And I betcha if I ask him, his switch back to typepad is related to the comment spam deluge we’ve all been getting lately.
May 22nd, 2006 at 5:05 pm
Well, TypePad isn’t immune either. And it’s got its own set of problems, such as difficulty with exporting. (The platform has an export facility, but limitations with it cause a virtual lock-in which is very difficult to work around, especially for large blogs.)
Feel free to point whoever my way if I can help out.