Product Announcement: Comment Guard Lite - Lightweight, Super-Fast Comment Spam Protection for WordPress Blog

We are about to release a new blog (WordPress) comment spam protection software. It has been extensively tested for over two months. We will deploy it first across our network of highly popular blogs. The new software named Comment Guard Lite was developed after gaining extensive experience with the leading Comment spam protection software - Comment Guard Pro. Comment Guard Lite provides super-fast (no database access required to identify spam) comment spam protection with zero false positives (no valid comment will be discarded as spam). Full article (1003 words) »

Spam + Donation = Spamation? Is it acceptable?

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?

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From Russia With Love

Have you *ever* received genuine Russian comments on English blogs?

I receive many many of Russian comments everyday. Previously I used to translate them because my blog is multi-lingual and Russian is one of the 32 languages this blog is available, thanks to automated. Down the road, I realized that I never got a single genuine Russian comment on my blog even though I received many genuine comments in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian etc.

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Coward Spammer Breaks From Prison And Kills His Family And Thankfully Himself

Only four days after escaping from a federal minimum-security prison in Florence, Colorado "Spam King" Eddie Davidson, 35, killed his wife, baby daughter and finally himself. Full article (172 words) »

MySpace Wins $234 Million Verdict Against Notorious Spammers (Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines)

MySpace was awarded $234 million in statutory damages, the largest ever anti-spam verdict made under CAN-SPAM and apparently under any law. This is also the first time damages have been awarded under the California Anti Phishing Act.

Full article (364 words) »

Dating Spam: With Love From Russia

Nadezhda - Dating SpamI received a non-typical email spam, a well written (spams are usually filled with bad spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, especially those from Dakar, Senegal for example) email from Maria Wyatt (most likely forged) claiming to be Nadezhda from Saint-Petersburg in Russia. Couple of photos were also included.

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Why Do Bloggers Get Comments With Strange Author Names

Would you approve a (blog) comment where the commenter's name is "Best Way To Loose Weight"? Any sane blogger would never approve such comments even if it is relevant to context. Do you know why?

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Comment Guard Pro (WordPress Comment Spam Protection Software) Released

Comment Guard ProI 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. We provide multiple layers of protection against all kind of comment spams.

Comment Guard Pro is a zero configuration plugin, even your grandma can use it. However if you want, you can configure every aspect of the system. You can make it your own, implement your own vision, replace, enhance and extend its functionality.

Comment Guard Pro is state-of-the-art comment spam detection software based on expert system to classify comments. Comment Guard Pro leverages several tried and tested comment spam fighting techniques & knowledge which is the result of several man-years of research into comment spam detection, both in-house and by the anti-spam community. We extensively tested and re-tested and fine-tuned the system with the key criteria - elimination of false positives and false negatives in comment spam detection.

Most spams are outright rejected without filling up your database and consuming your resource. Comment Guard Pro doesn't normally ask your viewers to do anything extra like solving a problem etc.
Note: We reject a comment only when we are sure about its spamminess.

Comment Guard Pro was born after years of frustration with the state of comment spam prevention software available today. They fall in two major categories. Either they are ineffective in stopping spam (too many false negatives) or too strict and even deny legitimate comments (false positives). They are a pain in the neck for genuine commenters, resulting in bloggers losing their audience, and generate lots of false positives (marks a genuine comment as spam) which consume bloggers time to moderate. They also consume bandwidth and CPU by saving the junk comments in your database.

There is another issue. To eliminate false positives from existing plugins, you have to check their spam queue manually. It might be ok for 5-10 comments in queue, but not for say 2000-10000 comments in spam queue as is commonly the case with a widely used Comment spam protection plugin today. Most of such plugins protect against some type of comment spam or other but not the whole range. Frequency based spam detection techniques, for example, let in deluge of spams from new spammers. None of these are acceptable. Ultimately you get frustrated and tired of bloggng and suffer burn-out.

A big issue with today's comment spam protection software is that you get a blackbox with no direct control over its actions. A widely used anti-spam plugin today is renowned for marking even the blog author's comment as spam and another for even locking out the blogger from his own blog! The software today doesn't respect your preferences. In short you lose control over your comments and have to blindly trust a third party for making the right decision about your comments; and often it fails.

Not any more. Comment Guard Pro puts you back in control over your comments. You control how it makes its decision. If you don't like the logic employed by a pluglet (a rule) then you can decrease its score, change its decision on success or failure and you can even disable it. You can even add your own pluglets to implement your grand vision. You are the boss.

Comment Guard Pro gives you back the control and time to do what you do best, blog.

Comment Guard Pro is pluggable. You can individually control each pluglets, configure and fine-tune their functionality and weightage. You can also write your own pluglets to add more spam prevention techniques, gather more statistics or anything else you may desire like sending a cute / angry note to spammers and more. It comes with fully documented open pluglet API and examples to enable you to write your own pluglets.

It comes with lots of valuable features and functionalities. It was extensively tested for about a year with over 5 million comments. It came out with flying colors. Read more here (press).

ContactThem Network Perfects Distributed Spamming

I have received dozens of spams from ContactThem Network affiliates who follow this simple template:

Hi,

Full article (266 words) »

Overview of Exploits Block List - XBL (Spamhaus.org) in Comment Spam Protection

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. Here are few observations from our testing.

Full article (378 words) »

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