Monday, February 18, 2008

Why Do I Get So Much Comment Spam?

I've had this website up for a few months now, and I've gotten over 6,000 instances of comment spam.  Not sure why I'm getting so much.  My site isn't all that popular, at least not traffic wise, yet my askimet spam filter gets pummeled with several hundred spam comments a day.  If my poor little site gets this much, I really wonder what some big websites get.  Now, I could do more to try and combat the spam.  I could certainly make it harder for my readers to post a comment.  But I think that really destroys the purpose of a blog.  I don't like solutions that make it hard for legitimate users to use a service just to prevent the bastards who try and make the rest of our life hard.  So for now, I'll just keep watching my askimet spam number go through the roof, and hope that your comments don't get lost in the crowd.

4 comments:

  1. You could implement a simple CAPTCHA.

    The author of Coding Horror says that when he added his captcha, the spam was drastically reduced, even though it's not dynamic - it's used a single word since he implemented it: "orange"

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  2. Good advice. I’ll look into it right now and see if I can do it easily.

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  3. [...] my last post, I openly wondered why I get so much comment spam.  It was amazing to me that a small site like mine could be the target of so much spam.  [...]

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