Akismet

October 28, 2005

Since Deane insists on directing traffic my way, I guess I’m obligated to provide some updated content, so here goes…

There has been a lot of talk the past few days about Akismet, the new blog comment spam filter service for WordPress. It sounds like a very promising solution to a really annoying problem.

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

Actually, comment spam on this site (of all sites) was what really kind of made not quit blogging several months ago. I got tired of digging through dozens of spam comments which was time that I could have been using to post.

As far as Akismet goes, the actual solution is not to far from how SpamStopsHere works. All messages/comments are routed through a centralized server that maintains the spam rules for all subscribers. No more do you constantly have to train your bayesian filter to recognize spam. It is maintained by someone whose sole job is to filter spam and it is done at a central location that benefits everyone as it becomes smarter. As much as some people like to maintain control (or don’t want to be bound to someone else’s solution), I think it just make good sense to have a centralized effort to try to combat such an annoyance.

So, am I going to try out Akismet? Nope. I solved my comment spam problem several months. It was pretty simple and very effective. It’s so easy, I’m not sure why it isn’t advocated more. Right now, even as my site is getting a little bit more exposure, I deal with one spam comment every couple of days. Actually, I’m almost to the point of getting more legitimate comments than spam! (That probably says more about how low volume and un-interesting my site is, than it does about the spam volume).

Enough already! What did you do? All you need to do to effectively deal with comment spam is to change the name of the file that handles comments and then update any references to that file. Most spam is auto-generated and is directed at the most common blogs. The spammers know that the interfaces are to submit comments and everything is rigged up to hit those sites that are built out of the box with no changes. However, by changing the name of the comment processor file, their scripts/bots/whatever they use, don’t work. Pretty simple. Of course, there is someone out there that is either automating posts via the interface, or they have gotten smart enough to check for the comment post action and modify their scripts accordingly. At this point in time, it is only a comment every couple of days, but it is the same type of comment.

One way to improve this solution for everyone would be to pull the references to the comment processor filename into one variable. Then, during installation, the user could be prompted for a unique name, or better yet, a random name could be generated and stored. The downside is that would provide the motivation to the spammers to get smarter about actively trying to determine what address comments are posted to which would then ultimately render this solution moot.

But for now, I’m one up and quite happy with my solution! If you need specific details about what I changed, drop me a comment and I will write something up.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under Plugins, WordPress 

Comments

3 Responses to “Akismet”

  1. Matt on October 28th, 2005 9:25 am

    Actually, after a little more research, I found a nice article by Six Apart, the Movable Type folks, detailing many different solutions for dealing with comment spam in Movable Type: http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/comment_spam.html

  2. Deane on October 31st, 2005 9:29 am

    Your solution is not totally foolproof. There are spambots out there that will sniff the ACTION paramters of the form in the page, then direct their bots to what they find.

    It does cut down a lot though.

  3. SwoofWare » Blog Archive » Kismet on November 3rd, 2005 3:28 pm

    […] SwoofWare A place to vent my technical outbursts. « Akismet Kismet According to Wikipedia, the definition of kismet is: […]

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