gregh  2007-03-12 13:49  akismet  Blogging  spam   

These people start off with such great feedback, yet they follow-up with all sorts of URLs!

"See you...Thanks, its great to receive such positive comments."

"This is a cool site! Thanks and wish you better luck! Brilliant but simple idea."

("Simple idea?" *sniff*)

"Your site was so interesting and informative I had to call a friend to tell her about it. Great work"

(Now, that one I like.)

I'm not willing to follow any of the links they've included.

Fortunately, Akismet continues to do a great job filtering this stuff out for me.

gregh  2007-01-28 03:02  akismet  Blogging  Drupal  spam   

After trying a number of things to combat spam, a little over 3 months ago I installed Akismet, a free-for-non-commercial-use anti-spam service from Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Of course, I don't use WordPress for this site; I use Drupal. No worries. The Automattic folks allow anyone to code to the API, and Markus Petrux of phpMiX.org has written a Drupal Akismet module.

As you can see from the counter in the lower right, in just over 3 months, Akismet has caught 100 spam comments. That seems to be a pretty good indicator that my site is not popular enough to be hit. I do run the Bad Behavior module, as well, which catches lots of comment spam before it gets to Akismet, rejecting it for petty little things like bad headers and stuff. My Akismet numbers might be higher, but I like that Referer spam is blocked by Bad Behavior.

Before Bad Behavior, the spam was much worse. But even with it, it was pretty bad. I used the old Spam module for Drupal, but it had pretty poor results. Then I shifted to captcha, but spammers got by it even when legit people couldn't.

Akismet has been wonderful. Nothing's slipped past, and nothing's been falsely accused of being spam. That's pretty good.