Spam Karma

Well after deleting what seems like hundreds of bloody comment and trackback spams over the past week, I’ve installed Spam Karma (billed as a “fearless Spam Killing Machine”) on this blog. If it’s successful, I’ll be installing it on my other WordPress blogs.

It includes blacklists, captcha or email verification for suspicious comments, a myriad of settings, all that good stuff. For now I’ve set it to “lenient” mode until I get a feel for how strict it is. Feel free to leave junk comments here to see how it goes. (But beware of deliberately leaving spammy comments — for all I know it may decide to blacklist your IP address!

PS. Tuesday 21:25. The manual install as in the ReadMe worked for fine me, except that you can’t get to the config page through the menus, you have to activate it from the plugins page, then go to the URL it quotes. (This is apparently a known thing with WP1.2, but I guess it applies to WP1.2.2 as well, which we’re running here. Presumably it doesn’t apply to the current nightly builds or to the future 1.5.)

Also be sure to try the test captcha page (linked off the config page) to make sure that bit works (eg the correct PHP libraries are there somewhere. If they’re not, I guess you need to hassle your ISP. Works fine for me.)

PS. Wednesday 21:15. There is a hitch: the e-mail it sends out summarising what it’s done is encoded with something. I think this is an incompatibility with the PHP setup on my ISP… the same thing happened with WordPress 1.2’s password reminder messages. I’ll have to dig around for a fix.

It should also be noted that Tony has tried to plonk it onto a blog he runs, and is having some issues. So it’s not all beer and skittles.

On the bright side, it tells me it caught 20 spam comments in the last 24 hours. I certainly haven’t seen any get let through.

PS. Thursday 20:05. Some are getting through, but evidently nowhere near the total number being caught. Hmmm.

18 thoughts on “Spam Karma

  1. Daniel

    Interesting. Well you didn’t fool it Andy, but overnight it did catch 8 real comment spams. No false positives, and no spams let through. It logs everything to a digest (which it emails you after X comments deleted) which includes all the comment details, so nothing is lost if it does get fooled and there are false positives.

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  4. Daniel

    Those latest attempts all got through SpamKarma, but were picked up by the internal WordPress filter.

    SpamKarma seems to be very successful with comments. It is less so with Trackbacks, some of which are getting through. I’ve considered disabling trackbacks completely, but they can be quite handy, so I’m reluctant to do so. Will do some more tweaking with SpamKarma though, and it looks like they will be improving its Trackback filtering facilities.

  5. Andy

    My SpamKarma doesn’t do anything with trackbacks which is why I’ve turned them off completely and bounced all requests to them to ‘localhost’ for now 🙂 I’m working on a more ‘evil’ bounce back – any ideas … you could reply to my request at Webmasterworld.

  6. Andy

    I now bounce all requests for /trackback to the originating IP, and I bounce all known bad referrers, taking care to add some suitable text in the filepath so it shows up in their server logs and it doesn’t benefit them by loading a real page. See my WordPress forum article on bouncing requests if you’re interested.

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