Wow, wow, and wow… I am very tempted to ponying up some paypal dough for Spam Karma 2, the powerful plugin for Word Press 2. It assigns incoming comments and trackbacks a karma value, based on your moderation habits, content in the comment, remote blacklists, and more.
There is a raft of options for you to select how finely it works, but more or less it jumps into action before the bad spam hits your blog notification. You do get to monitor its logs, delete the bad spammies, get a regular report by email. You can “rescue” items that ahve been mis-identified (this does not happened yet).
My approved comments (legit ones) have a positive karma average of 28.37 — and the bad stuff caught? It is a huge negative karma average pf -21784! Off the scale! The beauty again is that it is cutting off the spam (like the one with 285 URLs to a site I would not even share with my poker buddies) and I do not even need to see it. And the blacklists/whitelists it creates are adaptive to my moderation habits (which WordPress does not do, no matter how many times you moderate comments as spam).
The downsides are that the documentation is thin, and it is hard to know what some of the settings do. I also found I had to disable the Captcha Check option- apparently, if a comment is within a specified margin of being declared spam, it is supposed to provide a captcha to allow a legit commenter to prove they are nota bot. However, the captcha code apparently generates errors and does not work. The docs reference something to the “Kubrick” template, but I cannot find anywhere the support for generating captchas, and lots of techie references to installing server font libraries.
SK2 is the best defense I have played with so far.
Yeah. SK2 totally rocks! Thanks for the tip-off! My spams are averaging -5490.2, while actual comments average 25. That’s a pretty clear delta in karma between the humans and the roaches…
woah. as I was writing that response, a spam was caught with a karma rating of -76998.3!!! That’s some seriously bad karma. The kind that probably brings down the russian mob with a pillowcase full of doorknobs…
I was getting blasted with spam a few months ago. I installed SK2 as well, and took great pleasure in reading the logs. It worked great. Then I got an idea to try another spam filter, Bad Behavior, alongside SK2 as a sort of contest to see which would intervene first. I understand next to nothing about how these things work. It’s been a few months now and SK2 has not logged a single spam attempt. Bad Behavior is the heavy hitter. I think of it as a moat full of crocs around an electric fence with a gate wide open for friends to freely enter…spam-free for months!
Thanks for the tip, Doug. I would say whatever you can get to stomp spam is positive news.
However, I cannot say that your experience is a side by side contest… I too am not sure how plugins that do similar tasks work under the hood, but I am betting that Bad Behavior loads first because of alphabetical ordering of your plugins. Being effective, there would be nothing left for SK2 to work on.
A better test would be two different versions of your blog with each using a different spam plugin, but that might be fallible too as your established blog is already on the spam bot list of targets.
Regardless, if its trapping spam, yahoooooo! But rest assured, it never ends- the spammers are evoloving more quickly than the spam tools. Thankfully there are the generous folks out there willing to build and share the tools.