Tackling Comment Spam–For Good
Blogs are everywhere today; just about everyone has one and because so many people of various backgrounds, cultures and personal interests are involved with the caring and keeping of personal or entertainment websites, they have easily become the leading form of web media when it comes to attracting spam.
Web publishers need to constantly be on top of their comments, checking for spam and getting rid of it promptly before viewers see them and suddenly think we condone the buying and selling of illegal pharmaceuticals or we are unnaturally concerned about their personal and intimate relationships. Spam comments are equally bad for everyone involved in a particular website. They are irritating for the webmaster, having to check sometimes daily or even multiple times a day for comments that are inappropriate for the website and are offensive to readers and it also shows readers that a website may not be as professional as it would like to be seen. If a website fails to look the part of a multi-faceted, entertaining and above all, polished and mastered website, it does not matter how well your website does stat-wise, your viewers will not be interested and potential-advertisers will not take you seriously.
Dealing with spam comments can quickly become a second job for a webmaster, especially since the bigger a website gets, the more spam it attracts. The secret is to finding an efficient and user-friendly spam comment program to help eliminate the worry of unprofessional and inappropriate spam. If you are running WordPress, you are most likely still running the spam monitoring system Akismet that came with your original WordPress install; however, there are other programs out there, for WordPress in particular, that I have found to work much better than Akismet.
Defensio is a comment spam monitor and eliminator whose entire mission is based off of outsmarting evil spam, which it does miraculously. In my opinion, you cannot get any better than Defensio for taking the edge off when you’re thinking about how your website is doing and if any spam is leaking through.
With its innovative technology, Defensio actually adapts to the content you post and is proven not to work in the exact same manner for two different bloggers; instead, it adapts to the webmaster’s specific way of managing their comments and follow suite. Every comment that is posted on your website is given a level of “spamminess” and is determined whether or not the level it is given is low enough to be posted. On a personal level, I have seen comments with a spamminess level as low as 20% be held for moderation, just to make sure that it wasn’t someone trying to plug their site or a company looking for some shameless exposure.
With 99.77% accuracy, Defensio definitely gives you the security you need to be a successful, professional and efficient webmaster with absolutely no worry about back doors being left open for spam comments to get away with accessing your content. It tackles comment spam for several different user interfaces such as WordPress, PixelPost, Mephisto, Text Pattern, Movable Type and Drupal. It is also supported by several different web developer platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Java, Perl, PHP (4 and 5) and Python; all of which can be downloaded here.
Carl Mercier on Wed, 2nd Apr 2008 9:08 am
Holly, that was an -awesome- review! You really understand what we do, how Defensio works and why it’s better.
Your post should keep the team motivated for a few weeks! Thanks!
Jenny on Wed, 2nd Apr 2008 12:28 pm
I don’t use it. I like my Akismet which works just as well.
Sheena on Thu, 3rd Apr 2008 6:08 pm
Defensio is my pimp! Akismet used to eat up my REAL comments so I had to stop using it. I get so many spam comments in my quarantine but at least they aren’t out in the open annoying the public!
Teresa Morrow on Thu, 3rd Apr 2008 9:39 pm
Holly,
I appreciate your post. I am currently using Akismet but have had issues in the past with it. So it is nice to have another alternative that will work in a different (and most likely) better way than Akismet.
Thank you for your thorough analysis of the program.
I love to blog however, trying to control the spam can deter my enthusiasm sometimes.
Guy M'Naghten on Fri, 4th Apr 2008 2:31 pm
I’m going to have to try this out. It seems that I can’t get it perfect with Askimet. Either its letting too many spam comments in or its keeping too many real comments out. I tend to err on the side of inclusion because I really think comments are the backbone of blogging. But like you pointed out a lot of the spam keywords are pretty graphic or intimate, so I can’t really leave them up. Suffice it to say hand deleting comments is becoming too tiring for me.
James on Fri, 4th Apr 2008 3:32 pm
I am still using Askimet to tackle spam. So far so good… guess I have to wait for my blog to get bigger for me to really start worrying about spam.
Naomi Dunford on Fri, 4th Apr 2008 9:49 pm
That was awesome to read! I’m running Akismet and I have had so many emails from people telling me my blog is eating their comments. The first few times I thought they were full of crap, but I finally checked Akismet — didn’t really cross my mind before — and there were a boatload.
I’m going to look into that immediately. Thanks for letting us know!
Ami on Sat, 5th Apr 2008 3:51 pm
Spam is such a problem and you are right, getting rid of spam can very quickly eat up your time
Problem is some comments do add value to our blogs and in the world of web 2.0 interactive is the name of the game
Never heard of defensio but will definitely look it up
NSpeaks on Sun, 6th Apr 2008 2:25 am
I am using Defensio since December 2007 and see my post why I didn’t like Defensio at all: http://nspeaks.com/205/defensio-is-tiring-me/
Supreme Solutions on Sun, 6th Apr 2008 4:03 pm
Still using Askimet, I think the problem is their is a market for this type of spam. I was trolling on one forum and there was a guy chraging $ .25 a comment on relevant blogs, and he said that he could post a max of 400 posts a day per URL.
Sebastien on Mon, 7th Apr 2008 4:31 am
I’ve been using Akismet and honestly, that’s all I need. I probably get 1 or 2 spam unfilteres spam comments a month. I guess I don’t have the same amount of traffic as you get though.
Carl Mercier on Mon, 7th Apr 2008 7:35 am
Sebastien: In my opinion, how good a spam filter is should not be measured by the number of spam it lets through, but rather by a combination of false positives and false negatives. How many good comments is your current spam filter eating?
If you’re like I was before, you probably don’t know and don’t even bother looking. It’s too much of a chore. Defensio gives you an easy to navigate quarantine which makes it a breeze to find false positives.
When I switched to Defensio, I realized that I was missing a lot of good comments. They were buried in pages and pages of spam (ie: needle in a haystack). Now, the very rare FP just bubbles up to the top, making it extremely easy to identify.
Needless to say, we’d be thrilled if you gave us a shot
Motivational Posters on Mon, 7th Apr 2008 8:25 am
I have been a beta tester for Defensio. When there is a lot of spam, Defensio is extremely powerful (much powerful than Akismet). I applied for Defensio when the number of spam comments on my blog shot up suddenly. But it decreased with the same speed it rose and now there in no more spam trouble. But now Defensio is catching some of legit comments too (my blog is not a heavily commented blog). Overall, I am much more satisfied with Defensio than Akismet.
Carl Mercier on Mon, 7th Apr 2008 6:01 pm
Andk: if only it was that easy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work…
Andk on Mon, 7th Apr 2008 5:59 pm
Well, one major way to reduce spam is simply to turn off allow follow… since that is what a lot of marketers are attracted to when they go out to annoyingly promote their products.
Andk’s last blog post..Eight Tips for Negotiating an Office Lease Renewal
Forex Profiting on Sun, 13th Apr 2008 8:53 am
Defensio sounds useful but I am wary of these email-spam-stoppers. More often than not they make mistakes and mark genuine emails as spam and can cause you to miss important emails.
Seo Services on Mon, 5th May 2008 2:05 am
Hi Supreme Solutions,
You have mentioned that one could post a max of 400 posts a day per URL. Is it really?
But, I think that he might not checked do follow link. Otherwise, he couldn’t post 400 comments per day.
Cheap Binoculars on Fri, 16th May 2008 12:36 am
I am new to wordpress but I use askimet and it seems to work pretty good. Defensio looks promising and I might give it a try soon.
Holly on Sun, 1st Jun 2008 9:25 am
Tri: I definitely am more of a target firstly just because I have dofollow enabled and because of that, I really need a top notch spam filter and sadly, Akismet does not cut it, especially if you run a blog that is even semi-successful. As I’ve said before, the more popular a website gets, the more spam it attracts because it starts popping up all over search engines and other websites. The key to any happy blog is a spam filter that can actually do its job, which Defensio does amazingly, so in the end it doesn’t matter what plugins you have enabled that attract more spam because you know you have something that will catch what you don’t want.
albphone.com lajmet shqip » Blog Archive » Protect Wordpress blog against SPAM on Mon, 23rd Jun 2008 11:03 am
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Flingcom on Thu, 3rd Jul 2008 8:12 am
This sounds really usefull i am am not sure how much it is gonna work becoz most of the spam blockers does’nt block the spams but they block the other mails…
reseller hosting on Sun, 3rd Aug 2008 11:03 pm
Interesting product. I run a pretty popular blog and for now use akismet which works nicely. There are insidents though when spam does come in but it is rare. This spam protection product seems to be useful addtion, I will try to add to my blog as well.
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great work,
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Oturia on Tue, 11th May 2010 5:41 pm
I’m finding that people are getting more creative with their templated comments and it is making it harder to identify them. One of the more recent ones I received was:
“I am using the same template that you are using for your site, but mine loads so much slower than yours despite the fact that you have considerably more multimedia than mine”.
Seems like a valid comment, but the fact of the matter was that it was on a site I had just developed with only one “Hello World” article and absolutely no other content to speak of.
It would be nice to see some kind of comment network, like an integration of WordPress or Gravatar, that forces users to login in order to post a comment across the major blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, etc…). Commentors could be “graded” (like sellers on eBay). Commentors with X number of spammed comments would be banned, making a registered user ID useless after only a day or so of use.
It wouldn’t stop spam (I really don’t think anything will) but it would make spamming blogs hosted on/with major platforms a real pain in the butt.
It would also serve to allow people who do genuinely get out into the community and comment on do follow blogs are able to continue to do so without worrying about the whole world wide web closing itself up in a “Nofollow” closet making do follow links nearly impossible to get.
Simple CAPTCHA to the Rescue! | Woman Tribune on Tue, 25th May 2010 3:44 am
[...] perhaps even verging on the thousands of spam comments that had outwitted my anti-spam plugin, Defensio. An absolute incredible amount of comments that did not consist of your usual spammy content, but [...]