Are you a spammer? Yes? I’ve got a wish for you. I wish someone would create a virus or similar that I could send to your server and nuke it permanently.
Are you a comment spammer? Yes? Read above!
Yep, I, like many many other people hate the comment spammers. I love anti spam applications. Akismet is one of the best. It’s not perfect, but it’s damned good. So far it has blocked over 15,00 spam comments on this blog and 47,000 (!!) on my self-hosted blog. I have Spam Karma 2 helping out Akismet on the main blog too.
Reading the guest bloggers on Lorelle On WordPress (a great read!), John Pozadzides shares most of my feelings about the spammers. On his blog he has introduced a Terms Of Use which he says is working well for him. He asks why we don’t all have them. John, that’s mainly because I don’t get the readership that you do and don’t have a huge comment spam problem. If I did then I would certainly contemplate employing one.
As a postscript to his post he says
(PS - have you installed a HoneyPot yet? Well, what are you waiting for?)
I didn’t know what a “Honey Pot” was, so went and looked. Very simply put, it’s a wider audience intended version of Akismet:
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. We handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.
We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.
Anything I can do to help out killing off spam I will most certainly do. Thankfully, in the site that John linked to was a link to a WordPress Plugin called httpbl. this does the job of Honey Pot without having to work it outside WordPress. This means it’s the usual upload and activate routine. Nice and simple, a five minute job.
If you’re self hosted then go get the plugin, install it and join the war against spammers!
4 Comments
Hey, Collin! Very good points, and I’m totally with you on comment spammers. I’m not one to promote revenge, but something drastic has to be done to make comment spamming make comment spammers pay. We need to kill the economic benefits of comment spam.
I’ve found that the need to have a comments policy isn’t incumbent upon the number of comments. It is something that needs to be in place from the first moment you blog. Honestly. It’s a great sign that says “here is what I will accept” and you can point to it if someone crosses the line. It might be just one, but the sign was posted before the infraction.
It also represents a seriousness, showing you value your blog’s integrity and respect your readers to make sure they get the very best, in content and comments.
Greetings Collin,
You have written another excellent blog post on an important and timely topic. I’m in agreement with Lorelle the economic benefit is what must be eliminated. In fact I used Lorelle’s blog articles on commenting to establish my own comments policy and to boldly post it on my wordpress blogs. When I feel more confident about managing my own wp install I’ll be installing the plugin you recommend above.
P.S. I really DIGG this new blog of yours. :)
Actually you are not fighting spam by installing the WordPress plugin. I get the impression you are confusing the concepts somewhat.
Installing the plugin makes use of the project to fight spam on your blog, but that is all it does. If you want to contribute to the fight against spam you have to install a Honey Pot on your site. That is what helps the project track down harvesters etc.
I did so myself today (after having installed the plugin this morning) and it doesn’t take much effort or time. You already registered to get the code for the plugin so all you have to do is generate the Honey Pot script, upload it, activate it and link to it.
I put my link to it in the footer template to make sure it is on all my pages. It is invisible as is the email addresses used on the honey pot, which as a consequence merely looks like a policy page (should anyone ever see it).
For those who cannot upload pages with scripts to their webspace is there the opportunity to link to other peoples Honey Pots. The more people participate the better so I would definitely not limit myself to installing the plugin.
I will be writing more about this when I get time as I really think it is worth spreading the word about.
Jan
Many many thanks for the clarification. I will sort the honey pot in reasonable hours. it’s 02:39 am here and I have had more than a couple of shandies!
Please let me know when you do write about it so I can link it in a new post. I firmly believe that the more knowledge we can get going about the subject, the better the end result will be for all of us.
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