Well, after the great spamming of ’06 I thought things had settled down and I could live with the 30-50 comment spam attempts that Spam Karma 2 handles for me every day. I mean, I still have to quickly scan a long list of these blocked spam every now and then to make sure that good posts aren’t being blocked, but other than that it’s pretty automatic. I can’t remember the last time a spam comment actually got through.
However, the daily spam rate has been climbing up–I’m between 200 and 500 attempts a day now, and while Spam Karma is catching them all I’m annoyed with them: annoyed with having to look at them, annoyed with all the bandwidth that must be getting used by the spammers harvesting every post on my site, and by their constant submissions to the site, annoyed with the wasted CPU usage to analyze each of these posts and decide it is spam, annoyed with having all this spam in my database, etc.
(As an aside, I’m not sure why my little site gets this much spam traffic–I know lots of other WordPress sites that use pingomatic, have MANY more readers and people linking to them, and don’t see anything like this much spam. I secretly suspect it’s because I donated to SK2, and my blog is linked from the plugin’s “about” page. You know the spammers are dissecting that plugin, and that donors list provides a definite list of sites running SK2.)
So, I’m moving to a two stage solution. I’ve installed the newly release Bad Behaviour 2, which will theoretically stop most, if not all, of the spam traffic WordPress ever really gets involved: i.e. it won’t let the spammers harvest the site in the first place to find all the posts, etc., and it will notice when spambots attempt to make a post based on the details of the posting, not the contents of the post.
This should mean that the amount of spam attempts, and the amout of wasted bandwidth, will drop dramatically.
Then I still have SK2 to check the things that get through.
The only downside is, as with any change that involves automatically blocking some things, there is a tiny chance that adding Bad Behaviour will results in valid traffic getting blocked. I’m not terribly worried about this, since BB protects some very big deal sites where this would already have been noticed, but on the off chance that you try to post a comment and it doesn’t appear, feel free to send me an email about it.
If you don’t already know my preferred email address, you can use one formed by starting with “the_man” and appending the domain of this blog. I don’t check that as constantly as my preferred one, but I do check it at least every couple of days. I would just put a link, but why make it easy for the harvesters?
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