Question to mods about Akismet

Studley · June 11th, 2006, 22:05

Hey crew,

I started blogging on Wordpress a little while back, and I assume Xboxic runs from the WP software (the "old" Xboxic look is a Wordpress template, and there are a few other clues too!)

Anyway, I wasn't getting many comments on my posts, and I realised it was because I was only allowing comments for logged-in users. I removed the need to register, so now my comments work like Xboxic's, and there's been a steady stream of comments so far.

What's surprised me more is just how many spam comments there've been, and every single one has been successfully intercepted by Wordpress's Akismet feature.

So just a quick question for those who deal with the day-to-day admin of the site... how've you found the spam filtering? I know there were "upgrades" recently when there was a bombardment of spam comments, was this related to Akismet or did you do something else?

Cheers!

cybermans · June 11th, 2006, 22:13

curry should be able to answer that

Studley · June 12th, 2006, 12:29

Bumped for Curry, who's too busy trying to beat my Gamerscore to answer this

Curry · June 12th, 2006, 12:35

I've had a terrible amount of alcohol this weekend

And no, we're not using Akismet: it's only free for personal use, and we're technically a commercial site. Also, we're getting insane amounts of spamruns, far far more than your small blog is probably getting. Base configuration for Xboxic is simple: good blacklist for words that automatically put comments into moderation, small blacklist of hand-selected words (think 'phentermine') that are autotrashed, and all comments containing more than 2 links are automatically held for moderation.

The big one, and the change I made recently, is a challenge/response protocol ensuring that comments can only be posted by valid and intelligent clients, embedded inside the templates. That's the one that catches 99% of automated spam