Right at the bottom of the page, there is a little Akismet icon which tells you how much spam Akismet has caught. However a lot of the spam that arrives here Akismet never even sees it. I’m using a great plugin called TanTan Noodles Simple Spam Filter. It works by taking a lot of the common words used in spam and checking comments to make sure those words don’t appear. If you use one of the words in my spam filter, you will see a message from WordPress which says –
Sorry, your comment has been blocked because it contains one or more of the following words: upskirt.
Please confirm that you really want to post this comment. Note that if you post this comment, it may not show up immediately because it might get flagged as spam and/or moderated.
You then have to manually click on a button to confirm you are human and not a spam bot.
Why am I mentioning this? Obviously because I don’t want you to be surprised if you get that message. Though I think it is unlikely you will be using the words in my spam filter as most of them are drug names and pr0n related words.
I am also mentioning it because on top of the 60+ spam comments caught by Akismet, TanTan Noodles has caught – 91 spam comments. I checked it this morning and 40 of those were from today alone. If you’re on WP and you’re not using the TanTan Noodles plugin, I highly recommend it.
I don’t know why the spammers do it – I just don’t get the point. But while they do it I am grateful for these plugins. I was very anti-Akismet before moving to wordpress after some bright spark put ME in the Akismet spam bin and I kept landing in there when I made comments. I don’t like the idea that one or a small group of people can classify someone as spam, it is open to all kinds of abuse. However now I understand how it works and that I can pull comments out of there easily I’m ok with it. I just have to keep on top of it regularly.
Those of you on Blogger using word verification – you can turn it off and keep your commentors happy, because you’ll never get spammed the way WordPress users get spammed. You don’t need word verification to protect you on Blogger.
Spammers are awful. I couldn’t agree with you more. While I am OK on blogger, my work email is overloaded constantly. The spam filter is OK, but not great, and the spammers always seem to be one step ahead. It gets my goat, it really does!
– Heidi
Maybe the Spam plugin companies are actually the Spammers?
You never know! Trust NO ONE :)
Heidi – the question I would be asking is where did they get your work email address. Unless it’s out there somewhere on the internet for them to grab they’d have a hard time finding it.
My advice would be speak to your work IT department if they have one and find out if it is possible to get a new work email address which is only given to people who need to contact you for work, and see how that goes.
Forest.. wow, you just blew my mind.. ;) Look at those pieces of my brain!
Cheers,
Snoskred
There’s something perverse in the mentality of people who would send out spam. Certainly, they can’t believe that anyone does anything with it beyond grunting and deleting. I wish there was some way to really put an end to it. Large fines come to mind.
As for filters, I am all for anything that works.