Hi guys,
My site ( http://shunya.in ) recently started receiving some spam and I
had
ignored the issue till it became a problem, and I guess it is becoming a
problem now.
I looked around on suggested ways to address the problem and found two
systems - CAPTCH and Akismet. I consider both of them in this email
along
with the reasons why I am debating using neither of them. Then I ask for
your
advice.
CAPTCHA ( http://dev.2750flesk.com/validates_captcha/ ) will keep bots
out,
but what if some rascals are posting comments just to get a high google
page
rank. I think these guys are manually posting the “anonymous comments”.
So
CAPTCHA wont solve my problem.
Akismet ( http://akismet.com/ ) will solve my problem if their spam
detector
is good. I am close to using it, but wanted to get your opinion about
it. Has
anyone used it? Is it as good as they want us to believe.
Now I propose an alternative solution -
What if I put “rel-nofollow” in all links that are submitted via
comments, and
say I will do so right next to the comment form. Thus telling spammers,
“you
are welcome to post spam, but it will not help your cause.” Will it
discourage spammers. What do you think?
I have used the same solution on my webalizer info page
(shunya.in is available for purchase - Sedo.com), which is public. I has
started
getting “referral spam”, and in response I stopped posting “referrer”
part of
the webalizer results. Seems to have drastically reduced referral spam.
-kp
–
Home is where .emacs is
Hi there,
On 8/9/06, Kulpreet S. [email protected] wrote:
Now I propose an alternative solution -
What if I put “rel-nofollow” in all links that are submitted via comments, and
say I will do so right next to the comment form. Thus telling spammers, “you
are welcome to post spam, but it will not help your cause.” Will it
discourage spammers. What do you think?
I don’t think spammers actually read your page. So no it won’t stop
them…
A good CAPTCHA should do the trick. It’s what MSN/Google etc use.
Eaden
On 09/08/06, Kulpreet S. [email protected] wrote:
CAPTCHA ( http://dev.2750flesk.com/validates_captcha/ ) will keep bots
out,
but what if some rascals are posting comments just to get a high google
page
rank. I think these guys are manually posting the “anonymous comments”. So
CAPTCHA wont solve my problem.
I doubt anyone is manually posting spam, but I’d be interested in
finding
out what you base your claim on.
What if I put “rel-nofollow” in all links that are submitted via
comments,
and
say I will do so right next to the comment form. Thus telling spammers,
“you
are welcome to post spam, but it will not help your cause.” Will it
discourage spammers. What do you think?
rel=nofollow hasn’t worked. If anything, my blogspam increased since
adding
it. It stopped almost completely, when I put in CAPTCHA. YMMV though.
On Monday 14 August 2006 03:35, Hasan D. wrote:
I doubt anyone is manually posting spam, but I’d be interested in finding
out what you base your claim on.
Yup. I was wrong. The rascal is using scripts, what was I thinking? 
it. It stopped almost completely, when I put in CAPTCHA. YMMV though.
Well I now have rel=nofollow and Akismet.
Akismet is giving brilliant performance, got one “escaped spam” in
almost a
week. And the response times are low enough to be non-intrusive.
I just hope their systems scale well in future with increasing user base
and
potential attacks by spammers.
-kp
–
Cheers,
Hasan D. [email protected]
–
Home is where .emacs is