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.
9 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/
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