Over a year ago I jokingly noted that I had apparently “arrived” with my blog because spammers had found me and began regularly trying to post comments to the site. I am proud to say that to date no comment spam has successfully made it to public viewing, but unfortunately, that has taken a little effort along the way.
First, staying ahead of the abuse curve requires always installing the latest version of the WordPress software I am using for this blog. This may not seem like a big deal, but because I have customized things a bit to my liking, updating to the latest version of things often requires me to enter again my customizations. On more than one occasion I have broken things with the upgrade and had to take the time to research and fix the errors.
Second, though WordPress includes a rather effective plugin called Askimet that autodetects comment spam, the spam is placed in a queue that can be reviewed for false positives. Though there are very few misses, I feel obligated to wade through this large queue regularly to make sure no valid comments are missed; another big waste of time due to some lazy spammers ‘bots keeping mine in their attack list.
I recently tried to install a hidden programming trick that didn’t work, much to my chagrin. I have been hesitant to use other methods because they require you as users to read a funny image and type in the text (CAPTCHA), but now that appears to be my best solution. So, at this point I am testing out a CAPTCHA installation on the comments to see if that will cut down the hundreds of comment spam entries per day wasting the resources of my server and me personally. I apologize for the extra step on your part, but hopefully, you can bear with me.
You do have the option of skipping the CAPTCHA if you are a regular poster and would like to register as a user on this site. Registered users are not required to do this step.
Spam is definitely something that’s gotta go, but the reality is we can only hope to stay one step ahead.