Comments on: Maybe it is Time for a Super Premium Version of Akismet?

By: Live Stream

Live Stream — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:00:50 +0000

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By: Live Stream

Live Stream — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:02:10 +0000

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By: Chetan

Chetan — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:17:51 +0000

I have not much problems with Akismet, but that might be because my blog is not attracting many spammers and is not noted much.

Btw the image verification thing always helps, am talking about the plugin you shared in response to Darren’s comment.

By: Bengt

Bengt — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:56:54 +0000

I combine Akismet with WP-SpamFree which is a very powerful plugin against comment spam.

By: Steve Hall

Steve Hall — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:12:21 +0000

I use Akismet, in combination with Bad Behavior, and I’ve not seen either of the examples you used (nor anything that looks like them). In fact, over the just-concluded Labor Day weekend (US & Canada), I had exactly one spam to moderate (a true positive).

I believe relying on only a single anti-spam engine is not the wisest course of action; while it would be great if a single solution were an all-encompassing solution, we simply aren’t there yet.

Notwithstanding, there is no excuse for Akismet not blowing away your first example. (And what, exactly, is the POINT of such spam??)

By: Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:25:57 +0000

Darren, if you're having serious problems and it's WordPress you might want to consider coupling Peter's Custom Anti-Spam Image with a rare/unique font. It seems to have stopped spam dead on my comment pages; for about 10 months the only spam I've received has been the odd viral marketer, which of course are actual people and won't be stopped. I was getting 5+ a day before that, which prompted me to implement something. The beauty of this particular plugin is the customisation. Bots have been programmed to read CAPTCHA images, but they have to be specifically coded to do so. The moment you use an unusual font and start fiddling with the colours, their algorithms fail. Then the only way forward for them is for a programmer to spend a lot of time writing a new bot specifically for your site — unlikely in most cases. For best results, scour a free font website and find out that has lots of overlapping bits. The types of CAPTCHAs that are extremely difficult for programmers to conquer are those that have no clear definition between letters. If you have two slightly overlapping letters that're the same colour, they'll have a serious headache and most likely just give up. And that's assuming they're desperate enough to try and crack your specific site. :) Extremely effective. And as you can see on my blog, they don't even have to be difficult to read.

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:55:32 +0000

I don’t know if it’s Akismet or whether it’s spammers getting cleverer. I’ve been using Typepad anti spam which was great for a while but have exactly the same problem. I’m at a point where I’m seriously considering requiring readers to register to comment because while Akismet and Typepad anti spam have stopped literally millions of comment spams on ProBlogger – they are letting more and more through and I’m spending hours a week moderating crap like the ones you’ve shown. It’s getting out of hand.

By: Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:57:50 +0000

It’d be nice if there was something like Akismet that lets users know if they’ve been blocked, and then gives them option to undo the damage by filling in a captcha on another page. Then they can fix their own false positives, and if they are a manual spammer you can still blacklist them.

At the moment I have to put a conspicuous “If your comment disappears, use the comment restoration form!” notice below the comment box. This makes it easy for people to report a false positive, but it’s still a pain.

By: dinu

dinu — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:48:56 +0000

I think they need to make a really urgent update to their db .. :)