How Do You Guys Deal with Spam Comments?

4 points by abuzafor ↗ HN
As The spamming is increased dramatically and WordPress is a one of the most targeted platform. If you have been using WordPress for a while, You might have noticed thousands of Spam Comments. Actually, I want to know How do you deal with Spam comments?

8 comments

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The simple answer is not to run a blog on a platform that allows anonymous commenting. Apart from simple, that may also be the only answer.
This is not a solution! We need a platform that meets with our needs, Though It can has lots of bugs and issues but It also has solutions, We just have to find that.

As I think :)

If you think of a way to allow anonymous comments without spam, by all means get a patent right away.
Try to use Disqus for a while, you can transfer your Wordpress comments to Disqus and use WordPress as your blogging platform.
there is a nice little plugin "confirm you are not a spammer" which cuts down on comments quite a bit. I also make sure my blacklist is up to date ( I use this one):

https://github.com/splorp/wordpress-comment-blacklist/blob/m...

with both of those solutions, my main site does about 5k UV's a day, and I see about 20-30 spam comments per day (as opposed to a few hundred, easy)

For Wordpress I have a two pronged approach. The first is Askimet which still catches a lot of spam, and the second (much more effective approach) has been the plugin "IP Geo Block".

I started off with a blacklist containing the usually spammy suspects (China, India, Ukraine, Russia, Brazil), since they appeared to be the source of most of my spam comments.

It was OK, but stuff was still getting through. I then found it better to maintain a whitelist:

  US,GB,CA,DE,NL,SE,NO,DK,FR,ES,IT,BE,PL,SI,SK,LI,CH,PT,AT,AU,NZ,FI,EE,IE,IS,JP,LU,LV,ZA
My theory is that anyone (excluding VPN users) that originates from a poor country, especially one that is non-English speaking, is more likely to be a spammer. My reasoning: spamming is a low margin business that uses outsourced cheap labour and/or countries that have a poor record of cracking down of spamming and botnets.

To date this has been very effective. What spam I get these days is the tamer 'test the water spam'. I think this is where spammers use new email accounts to try and get them onto Askimet whitelists (bloggers are more likely not too mark these as spam). There are never any website urls in the content though there maybe a link in the website field, and the email reads something like:

   This is very interesting, You’re a very skilled blogger.
   I’ve joined your feed andd look forward to seeking more of your great post.
   Also, I have shared your site in my social networks!
Here are my stats (blocked comments by country). I don't get many comments on my blog in total anyway:

  Blocked by countries	
  CN: 3787
  RO: 76
  VE: 236
  TR: 133
  ID: 69
  IN: 12
  SC: 30
  AR: 3
  AL: 1
  TH: 46
  BR: 33
  UA: 284
  RU: 145
  CZ: 4
  IL: 8
  MO: 2
  MY: 4
  VN: 9
  EU: 4
  SG: 9
  LT: 1
  EG: 11
  HR: 5
  BD: 5
  MX: 1
  PH: 1
  TW: 29
  PE: 3
  PK: 3
  TJ: 1
  RS: 3
  KR: 5
  HK: 45
  CO: 6
  DZ: 6
  GR: 2
  PR: 1
  IR: 3
  NG: 6
  LY: 1
  CR: 1
  MD: 3
  BA: 1
  PA: 1
  SD: 1
  IQ: 7
  MM: 1
  CL: 3
  AE: 2
  KH: 2
  BI: 1
  NP: 1
  HU: 4
  PY: 2
  A2: 2
  A1: 1
  KZ: 1
  EC: 2
  LB: 1
  TN: 1