Spam
I’ve wanted to update this site much more frequently than has been the recent practice.
The unfortunate circumstance is that up to five hundred (500) spam messages per day have been coming this way. At this rate, my energy for posting new material seems to be wiped out by the effort of filtering and deleting the spam.
There are posters who speak many of this planet’s languages, though not the language of this blog. Or who are part of commercial enterprises. I don’t want to apply imperfect automatic filters that would remove their contributions, but I’m not sure what to do.
Would a mailing list devoted to pencils be a better medium? The spam filtering in that realm is more advanced that that of the blogosphere.
Any thoughts appreciated!
January 8th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Have you tried Akismet? It’s the same people who made WordPress, and it’s very effective. You do need to check occasionally for false positives, but I’ve found it very reliable on Drupal - if anything it will probably be *better* on WordPress, as that’s what it was developed for. It certainly has a better success rate than any email spam blocker I’ve used.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Thanks Michael, I will investigate Akismet.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
whatever you choose to do - don’t give up! Pencil revolution, Ninth wawe designs just to mention a few of the “pencil places” on the net, who have more or less gone out of buisness recently - websites dedicated to pencils are rare these days. Don’t let another one die.
kind regards
Henrik
January 12th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Hi Henrik,
We’re not giving up - Akismet it is, which I just installed. I like it because it presents no extra barriers to blog readers. Let’s hope it works. My thanks to Michael for the recommendation.
January 13th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I am very interested to hear about how Akismet works for you. If you were getting up to 500 spams per day, after just a few days with Akismet installed you could reveal a new amazingly small number and wow us with its efficiency?
January 13th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Hi Dave,
There has been no spam since installing Akismet! Of course I’m afraid of getting false positives, and don’t see a good way of verifying the program’s function - I don’t see any log created that I can review. But for now it seems good, and the hour I might have spent deleting the spam was put into preparing a new post.
Stephen
January 16th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
I think there should be an admin bit somewhere where you can review what it’s done. In Drupal, anything flagged as spam stays in the database, just flagged as Spam and Not Published - I can bring up that list at any time, and check on it. I’ve had a *few* false positives, but not many at all (only perhaps one every couple of weeks or so).
The best part about Akismet is that if something manages to slip through, when you submit it as spam, not only are you removing it from your site, but you’re reporting it back to Akismet’s servers, and helping to train them.
Having said all that, PigPog doesn’t get that many spam attempts anyway - there are probably more spambots programmed to hit WordPress sites than Drupal, just because there are more of them out there.