Bad Karma by Spam Karma Filter

June 3rd, 2005 Diatribe against Referrer Karma, a WordPress plugin gone wild.

December 24th, 2004 My recipe for getting rid of comment spam once and for all: Install WordPress 1.2.1 or later. Install ImageAuth hack Go to Options Tab.

February 12th, 2005 I accidentally stumbled upon a site ( spam-guard[dot]blogspot[dot]com ) which exists for the sole purpose of spamming. It is a spam blog or splog! For sometime spammers have targeted blogs, first through comment spam and now increasingly through trackback spam.

April 28th, 2005 Sometimes I find people evangelizing some religion through comment spamming. Is it spamming? I think it is.

January 16th, 2007 I have experiemented with all the available WordPress plugins for comment spam protection including but not limited to Bad Behaviour, Spam Karma 2, Akismet and built-in WordPress features like blacklists and moderation queue. We have to deal with tens of thousands of spam everyday.

February 2nd, 2007 Update: Comment Guard pro has been released. Please check the features here.

March 14th, 2005 I receive daily several thousands of spam emails on debt consolidation, mortgage and on organ enhancement advice/pills for organs I do not possess. I have been offered millions by unknown Nigerians, offered services I do not care about, images which were bad enough to spoil my day! I manage to filter most of them daily using SpamBayes, a naive bayesian filter integrated closely with Outlook.

November 28th, 2005 Imagine a pickpocket leaving a note in the pocket they have picked informing the victim that they are very sorry about picking their pocket and what he can do to rectify the situation. Neil found ethical spammers in his wiki (read about wiki spamming) who left a note after they spammed: < !– We leave content intact.

March 3rd, 2005 A recent trend in spamming observed in Larry Seltzer's blog and elsewhere is to use very small font size characters to create an ascii art to provide spam messages. What is interesting is that unlike the example above spammers can use legitimate email messages chosen randomly from computers they have hacked to create the ascii art.

November 22nd, 2008 While writing an article about the best security plugins of Wordpress, I felt the need to touch another very important security issue for the bloggers, and i.e. Anti Spam Plugins.

April 7th, 2006 Akismet is WordPress hosted spam filter from Matt M. I have been using it for about a week now.

May 29th, 2006 I briefly reviewed my corpus of 4569 comment spams in my Akismet queue. Of them over 53% of the spam has been contributed by Top 100 spamming IP addresses.

March 30th, 2007 I have just started downloading my email and guess what - I have 4538 email messages in queue, most of them obviously spam as even Bill Gates isn't that popular. Unfortunately my new stopgap setup doesn't have a bayesian filter setup so I will have to filter them manually.

May 28th, 2006 Akismet is a spam prevention plugin from the WordPress author, Matt Mullenweg. It uses collective wisdom in filtering spams.

March 2nd, 2009 I got this interesting spam in my comments today: Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children ugandf What do I do? I figured someone who can stoop so low as to spam is not likely to donate his ill-gotten wealth.