Comments on: Give it up?

By: walt

walt — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 15:37:02 +0000

May I just add a profound thanks to Jessamyn, Amanda, Laura, and Blake. While one persistent spammer seems to have given up, others keep arising–and, so far, Spam Karma 2 is precisely trapping them all. It’s a LOT easier to check the spam panel once every day or two (to release anything improperly trapped) than to get all that email about moderation…

First names used here because that’s how people signed their comments. In general, I’m trying to adhere to the idea that full names get used on first mention, when the full name’s used in the source.

(Yes, I know, West, Etches-Johnson, Crossett, Carver. Still, when we’re all first-naming in comments, I think it’s OK.)

By: walt

walt — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 14:57:54 +0000

Thanks. The control panel looks fairly straightforward. I don’t mind dealing with a modest amount of spam, so for now I won’t mess with most parameters (and actually increased the time range for “active” posts). I’ll tune as seems necessary.

It sure was a revelation, though, after turning on Spam Karma, to see that very long list of posts that WP had trapped on its own (thanks to the set of words I added)–although I thought those posts were just deleted, not held as spam. After the first 100, going back four days, I just changed “purge after 30 days” to “purge after 5 days” and got rid of the whole mess, then changed back the purge time.

As with any other use of spam control or whatever, my apologies in advance to anyone whose comment might not make it through. I think that, overall, there shouldn’t be much change…and I really do hope to avoid the draconian measures (full-time moderation, “registration,” full-time Capcha). The high (and highly unpredictable!) conversational level on this blog is a delight, and helps keep me blogging once in a while and writing almost every day.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 14:33:39 +0000

Spam Karma has some pretty good features, one of which is a CAPCHA implementation for people who would otherwise see their comments go to the spam box. I havenn’t turned it on myself, but it’s a good way to get benefits from the CAPCHA functionality while not making most commenters have to use it. If you want any help with SK once you’ve installed it (I use many of the default settings but changed to overall level of spam killing from Normal to Kinda Mean, or something similar) please drop me an email, I’d be happy to help.

By: walt

walt — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 18:47:19 +0000

Thanks. Based on these comments, I’ve asked Blake to copy Spam Karma 2 to my directory; I’ll activate it as soon as it’s available, and see what happens. Right now, the chief problem is one bizarre poster from an IP address with no reverse DNS entry (!), apparently trying to increase pagerank for a URL that doesn’lt seem to work (!), making the usual fatuous “what a great log!” comment over and over and over…

Turns out there is a Capcha plugin on my directory. If Spam Karma doesn’t work, I will, reluctantly, activate Capcha.

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 18:32:59 +0000

I’ve had very good luck with Spam Karma 2 on lis.dom. For some reason, though, my other blog gets far, far more spam, and more of it seems to slip through Spam Karma 2. I finally turned the settings up to “total beeatch” (SK2 lingo, not mine), which has cut down on it a bit. . . it’s all very mysterious.

By: amanda

amanda — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:05:59 +0000

I second Jessamyn’s Spam Karma 2 recommendation. I was getting about 30-50 spam comments per day until I installed it a couple of months ago. Ever since? Bliss!

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 04:01:18 +0000

This is a wordpress blog right? I would seriously recommend just using Spam Karma 2. I almost never think about comment spam now that I have it enabled. Spam queues up, almost all valid comments get through and you don’t even have to read the spammy comments, they just eventually disappear into the void. I’ve been using it for a few months, trapped thousands of spam comments and I’ve only had a few good comments get trapped which I whitelisted and it’s never happened again.

http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/