are you a spammer?
In an attempt to combat blog spam, I’ve modified the WordPress 1.5 code slightly. My comment submission form now has a “not spam” checkbox, which must be selected for the comment to be considered genuine. To do this, I modified wp-comments-post.php (diff) and wp-content/themes/mytheme/comments.php (view modifications). I have no idea if it will help, but I guess it’s worth a try…
April 13th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Have you tried using spam karma? It works for me, however it didn’t help with trackback spam. This I “fixed” by renaming the trackback files to something like newwp-trackback.php.
April 13th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
No, I haven’t tried Spam Karma. I seem to remember that there was some reason why I didn’t install it when I first heard of it, though now I can’t remember why. If my checkbox doesn’t work, I’ll take another look at it, though.
April 13th, 2005 at 6:20 pm
wow the not spam checkbox is a simple but cool idea :)
April 13th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
Are you a spammer
An interesting and simple way of attempting to block comment spam by adding an “Are you a spammer” checkbox” - however it won’t last long before it gets added to all the spamming scripts as the checkbox has a fixed name and other blogs won’t mind…
April 13th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
I am writing on behalf of the Royal Pork Society of Great Britain. We are concerned that you are trying to restrict access to one of our staple products - a mainstay for many years and improved substantially since we have been able to remove the slightly metallic flavour arising from the canning process.
We do hope that you will review this change to your site.
Copy - for information - to:
Society for the Protection of Animal Meat
From
Sad Person Acting Madly
April 14th, 2005 at 10:19 am
Nice idea!
As a refinement you could randomize the name and whether or not the box has to be checked.
Also, you could require the user to stay on the page for a certain time.
If you want to be extra userfriendly, you could also automatically do the right thing after so many seconds with some javascript.
Ah, whatever. Probably not worth the bother.
April 14th, 2005 at 11:55 am
And what about about blacklisting spammers with mod_rewrite? ;)
My IP blacklist (more than 1000 IPs): http://www.sukria.net/data/ip-baned.txt
How I block blogspam : http://www.sukria.net/en/archives/2005/02/11/how-to-fight-blog-spammers-with-bash-mod_rewrite-and-cron/
April 15th, 2005 at 10:06 am
Hi,
in one blog of mine I have captchas. Of course the implementation I use might have a flaw, or some spammer is just brute-forcing it - or a human is actually responsible for entering them - but I still got a couple of blog spam postings there (two or three times, two submissions each or so)… :-(
Well, your mechanism is probably a bit easier, and will still save you a lot of moderation work, keeping some spambots out. Congrats!
The other filter mechanisms still held the posting for moderation, and the spammers would not have gaind much… (the blog doesn’t have a pagerank and its a recent wordpress using the nofollow attribute anyway)
April 15th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Randomizing whether the box has to be checked could be worse. If you did that without changing the default state of the box, you could ignore the box and still post a message 50% of the time.
The use of Javascript is not always user-friendly, either. We use the Javascript-enabled hashcash (invisible to almost all users; semi-effective) at Grand Text Auto. But I know of at least one lynx user who can’t post because of this.
Perhaps the problem with a set technique like this one is that after a while, some person can quickly hand-code the way to post messages on jtd, and then all their bots can post. Then the chase continues…
April 15th, 2005 at 9:03 pm
You’re right, it would be very easy to hand-code a spam script for j-t-d. I wonder whether a spammer would go to such effort for one site, though? It’ll be interesting to find out I guess.
May 5th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
And sure enough, someone has already written a script that circumvents my checkbox. I have, however, changed things slightly, which might keep spammers at bay again for a short while….
April 5th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
Hi
To write the letter, it is necessary …