Over the last two months or so there has been a surge of comment spam on this very blog. It has come to the point where I have been erasing 200 email notifications for comments on GeoLand; all of them for Viagra and other exotic drugs.
The time has come to step up and do something about it. I wanted a solution that is easy to install and does the job right. Reading a few blog posts on other wordpress blogs that have had similar problems I decided to give Math Comment Spam a go. At a 4Kb download and 2 minute install instructions its not bad of a solution.
I just dropped the two php files of the zip file in a subfolder of my plugins directory (/wp-content/plugins/), enabled it, and dropped a small piece of code in my comments.php file and I was ready to go. Now spammers have to physically take a look at the form and solve a very elaborate math problem which might discourage them a bit, since now the whole process stops being automated (using automated spam bots).
While on the subject I have to note that while looking personally at all these comment notifications I might have missed a few good posts. If you don’t see a legitimate post of yours left whithin the last two months, I apologize; please post again.
UPDATE (sep 16th): the math comment plugin does really work !!! I have actually received only one spam message in a period of more than a week, while in the past I had to go through hundreds of spam messages daily to see if there was any legit among them.
12 responses so far ↓
1 Olaf // Sep 17, 2007 at 8:36 am
this plug-in is very good but need some more features like for the error handling (post something within IE with the wrong sum).
I modified the plugin to get written numbers because after a while the comment spam was not over
2 Anonymous // Sep 17, 2007 at 3:19 pm
SPAM: fighting back…
Comment spam is a big problem for every blog owner, while a lot of spam is send to the trackback URI is there also a lot of spam send directly to the comment form. This article gives a good idea how to prevent spam using the wordpress plugin “Math Com…
3 Arslanlar Şehri » Spam’lere karşı nihai çözüm: Matematik // Sep 18, 2007 at 1:43 pm
[…] Gündelik rss beslemelerimi okurken, yeni bir yöntemle, bir çoğumuzun kullandığı ama bir o kadar basit bir çözüm’den bahsedilmişti. O da Math Comment Spam eklentisi. Yorum’u yazdıktan sonra sizden sadece küçük bir toplama sorusu soruluyor. 4 + 8 , 9 +9, 3 + 7 gibi. Eklentiyi indirikten sonra, /wp-content/plugins/ dizine açıp, sonra da wordpress yönetici panelinden açtırmak gerekiyor. Ardından site‘deki kodu da temanızda istediğiniz yere koymanız gerekiyor. […]
4 krillz // Sep 18, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Well might seem like a good idea but it’s very easy to bypass.
Just read up on parsing text, the bot could easily find 3 + 4, calculate it without any hussle and pass it into the text field.
It’s just a matter of time before this will not work anymore.
5 Website Promotion // Oct 5, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Yes, spam is a big problem now. I add to my forum captcha for registration, and now I have changed url to nofollow in posts. On blogs it looks similar. Sometimes I have problem to solve these complicated math tools, but it is necessary protection on spam now.
6 Web Designer // Oct 14, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Thanks for the link, will give that a bash. I had the same problem with Joomla content management system - managed to get a CAPCHA form plugin for that, and the spam went away - for now. These math sum checkers seem really good.
7 Derric // Jan 18, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Absolutely spam is a global problem not only for search engines but for people who use mail.
8 Derric // Jan 18, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Seacrh engines like Google and Yahoo are overfilled by spam. What will be the next?
9 dpdhunt // Apr 26, 2008 at 9:45 am
Check out http://www.akismet.com/
10 ale.xandre // Aug 18, 2008 at 1:34 am
very good!
I’m from Brazil!
11 jbarry // Oct 8, 2008 at 9:35 pm
this was really good thanks for posting
12 juan.suarez // Aug 14, 2009 at 4:58 am
well after having read your entry I wonder if automated spam is the main source of the spam you used to receive, since if it is, the spma filter you added is useful, but if it is not, I agree with others when sayign that it’s a matter of time before viagra comment notifications appear. However this entry is from september 2007…. have it worked well?
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