Best Spam Blocker Still Kicking Ass

Oct 5, 2009   //   by Hackadelic   //   WordPress  //  18 Comments
This entry is part of a series, The Spam Chronicles»

Disney - Poisoned (Explored)This is almost scary! Week 2 is nearly over and still not a single spam comment in the queue!

I can’t believe how good a job this spam blocker software does… I’d say it is the best spam blocker I ever had on any WordPress blog. Antispam on steroids… πŸ™‚

But I need to be sure that real comments are not blocked before I make that statement.

So please, if anybody tried to comment and was rejected by my spam blocker,
by all means, let me know!

18 Comments

  • How’s your anti-spam addon going, ready for public release?

    • I had to make a few more changes, and I’m observing the mid-term effect now. It’s doing pretty well though πŸ™‚

  • lol, was trying to help test your spam filter πŸ™‚

  • this is a spam test, sell BEEP, sell BEEP, gimme BEEP. http://youBEEP.com [moderator remark: this comment was heavily censored]

    • Haha that’s funny! πŸ˜€

      That’s not how the blocker works though.

      But thanks for the reference πŸ˜‰ (which I deleted for child-welfare)

  • I mean that every post I make gets flagged as ‘This post is held for moderation’.

    In a perfect world, after a post (or two) you’d see ‘This Ipstenu chick isn’t a damn dirty spammer!’ and my comments would always appear without the need to approve on your end. But no, it’s not a spam blocker problem, really.

    My desires are:
    1) Spammers are
    1a) blocked from commenting at all or
    1b) caught if they manage to comment

    2) Real people don’t have to wait for me to step in for them to have a conversation

    Right now, I’m running the http:BL WordPress Plugin and Akismet. I like the http:BL one since it logs whomever it catches, and is sort of a low-end version of bad-Behavior. I may go back to BB eventually, even though it doesn’t work so great with WP-Super-Cache (and I need that to not die when I get hammered with traffic on Thursdays).

    I set up my prefs to only moderate the first comment, and that seems to help somewhat.

  • Er … and that’s why I’d like to see/try your plugin πŸ˜‰

    Hit enter too soon (and amusingly, I’m moderated here…)

  • Ah, we’re on the same page there, then. I get about half my posters moderated right now, and as a spam filter, it’s working fine. I don’t get a huge number of comments, and combined with Akismit, it’s okay.

    That said, I’m not sure if the ones being flagged as spam are being caught by NoSpamX or Akismit, so the efficacy is iffy.

    • My Akismet (almost) never filtered legitimate comments. There were a few at the beginning, and even fewer later on. That’s why it was so hard to go through several hundred spam entries to perhaps find the one or two false positives.

      I can’t tell how Akismet works right now though – it hardly ever gets a chance to do its job! πŸ™‚

      What did you mean by “I’m moderated here”? Were you told your comment was spam? Can you describe/reproduce the conditions?

      I’m very much interested in your feedback on this, as it could be a sign of potential for false positives in my spam blocker.

  • It hasn’t let any spam in that I’ve seen. Everything ‘moderated’ is a legit comment, 99.9999% of the spam-flagged is spam.

    • Exactly why it didn’t work for me. The “moderated” legit comments are clearly false positives. With false positives I couldn’t use the blocking feature. I could only use the thing as a spam filter, which defeats the (only) purpose to use a spam blocker – to relieve me of the burden to manually check tons of entries in the spam queue.

      In my last comment I phrased it wrongly. I mean it either blocked real comments (in blocking mode), or there was definitely too much in my spam queue to check. A condition between a rock and a hard place…

  • @Hackadelic – I have NoSpamX set to ‘moderate’ and I’ve not noticed any False Positives as of yet. I just don’t like ‘birdbraining’ users without knowing who they are. At least Bad-Behavior logs everything to the database, so I could go look and see who was blocked.

    FWIW, I’m no longer using Bad-Behavior because I’d have to put WP-Super-Cache half-on, and I kinda need it full on.

    • To me NoSpamX was of no use. It either blocked real commenters, or left too much spam in.

  • Wow that’s cool! BTW, does it also prevent spam registration? I’m currently using NoSpamNX.

    • Photon, it does.

  • Testing for ya too.

    If this works, will you share? πŸ™‚ I’m using NoSpamX and not really sure if I like it.

    • Ipstenu, have you noticed false positives w/ NoSpamX, too?

  • Testing comments on your new spam block plugin πŸ˜‰

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