In the beginning I thought it was cute, what funny message will some spammer send me today that almost looks like a real message? I even considered a blog post, posting my favorite spam messages, so I chose not to employ any spam fighting tools on my blog in order to collect messages.
What happened?
Today, I officially became fed up on Spam, and I don’t even like canned meat. After a quick search for WordPress plugins, I chose to employ WP-SpamFree. It’s a back-end tool that causes no inconvenience to my readers (assuming you have javascript and cookies enabled) and is supposed to have virtually zero false positives. According to the literature, it is difficult for bots to deal with either javascript or cookies, so this tool uses both to keep auto-spam from hitting my blog comments. Supposedly I should now receive virtually no spammed comments. I look forward to letting you know if it works well.
What do I know about spam?
Quite a bit, actually. During my employment with a Web hosting company, I was referred to as the “Postini Queen.” We were a reseller of Postini services (which my current Web host, Hostmonster.com, also offers to its customers), and I learned everything Postini my mind could absorb over the course of a year and a half. I’ve seen more tricks used by spammers than I ever saw from my dad (previously known as The Great Austinini. He was great at card tricks.) Which is why I was a bit surprised that a couple of spammers are so good, I nearly thought a couple of their comments were real.
How do I determine spam versus non-spam?
First I look at the message. Many are easy to spot. But some say, “Great article, i hope i can know much information About it!” Ok, so maybe this guy isn’t a native English speaker. Maybe this comment is real. This takes another step. I look at the name and email address of the commenter. Hermes Handbags at some unpronounceable email address from gmail? I doubt that’s real. Then comes the comment that’s almost convincing, “Thanks for this very informative article.” The English is correct. It fits the subject of my blog (to inform). The name and email address look fairly believable. This time I pull out the big guns. I go to http://dnsgoodies.com and copy/paste the commenter’s IP address into the IP field and let the results judge the validity of my comment. The IP address belongs to a server that resides in some uknown city in Mexico? Spam? You got it.
So, why don’t I just employ a Captcha or a math equation? Because I find the Captchas difficult to use and, in general, annoying. The math equations are ok, but I wanted to give WP-SpamFree a try before taking further measures. I’ll keep you posted.
What do you use to fight spam?
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![[Digg]](http://www.kandikreatives.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
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![[LinkedIn]](http://www.kandikreatives.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/linkedin.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.kandikreatives.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Twitter]](http://www.kandikreatives.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Email]](http://www.kandikreatives.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
