Spam Me Ye Comment Spammers!

February 6th, 2004 After some deliberation, and seeing others, I decided to leave the commenting section on my blog un-moderated. Today I was mildly surprised to find almost all my posts had a comment to it.

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.

February 22nd, 2007 Comment Guard 0.3 Beta is a bug fix release. Very occassionally the plugin would request a valid commenter to submit his comment again.

November 4th, 2007 Comment Guard Pro is finally turning out to be the uber anti-comment spam protection plugin I dreamt of; everything you would ever want in a comment spam protection plugin and more, much more. The plugin itself is composed of several modules, each of which can be individually enabled / disabled, tweaked and configured all from the user interface.

December 3rd, 2004 Lycos Europe as you probably know has created a screen-saver which allows a controlling lycos software to target the idle time of the machines which installed the screen-savers to flood the network of known spammers. Some people are getting concerned that it amounts to ddos attack.

January 24th, 2005 A discussion on rel="nofollow" technique versus CAPTCHA

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.

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

December 20th, 2007 Ever since we installed Comment Guard Pro, anti comment-spam plugin on this blog, it stopped over 1 millon spam comments (1001011 spam comments were blocked by Angsuman's Comment Guard plugin in 335 days 8 hours 38 minutes. 99.338 % of the comments received during this time were spam.) so far (look in the right sidebar for latest stats).

March 22nd, 2004 As you all know blogs are a good place to dump the links to your casino/gambling site or other scams. Unfortunately I actively resist any attempt to spam this blog.

November 30th, 2007 I like to say that Comment Guard Pro will be the final plugin you will ever need for WordPress comment spam protection. It contains 18 pluglets for protecting you from comment spam, an open API for you to write your own pluglets, detailed live statistics (AJAX updated) and more.

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.

February 5th, 2008 The Spamhaus Exploits Block List (XBL) is a realtime database of IP addresses of hijacked PCs infected by illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies (HTTP, socks, AnalogX, wingate, etc), worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits. I was recently testing this list againt spam email.

September 9th, 2007 Sometimes I see comments where the name of the person is not really his name but a popular keyword which obviously links to his website. While I understand the need to have link-love for useful comments and even encourage it, the name field shouldn't be abused by using keywords like "Web Banner Design", for example.

March 3rd, 2008 I am very happy to announce the much-awaited release of Comment Guard Pro for WordPress blogs. Comment Guard Pro is designed to unobtrusively protect your blog against all types of comment spams - trackback spam, pingback spam, robotic spam using comment form, human submitted spam (where the spammers actually goes to your site to spam you; they are the hardest to detect), referrer spam etc.