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Trying Mollom antispam

2008 August 5
by dnorman

I’ve been having a fair number of spam comments get tgrouh the filters on my blog. I’ve tried Akismet. I’ve tried SpamKarma2. I’ve tried Akismet AND SpamKarma2. Still, I get over a dozen spam comments published on my blog every day (and hundreds successfully killed by the filters on a typical day).

It doesn’t sound like much of a problem – a dozen or two spams to deal with every day – but it makes keeping a blog with open comment posting more tedious than it needs to be. I shouldn’t have to fear leaving a computer for extended periods of time, nor dread returning to connectivity after a couple of days to sift through the crap that got through (and hopefully not accidentally nuke any valid comments).

So, it’s time to give Mollom a shot. I’ll try it for a week to see how it works out. It’s free. It works with WordPress (and Drupal, and several others) and claims to be quite effective.

Update: wow. I know it’s waaaaay too early to tell, but in the hour since enabling Mollom, I’ve had ZERO spam get through. 26 attempts blocked already, and no moderation needed. That’s a VERY good sign.

Update 2: jinx! as soon as I posted the first update, 3 spamments got through. doh…

8 Responses
  1. August 5, 2008

    just testing out the comment spam filter – maybe it’s working so well because it’s killing all comments?

  2. August 5, 2008

    saweeet. comments are getting through. but no spam. yet. woohoo!

  3. James Farmer permalink
    August 5, 2008

    Have you tried this… http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/

    Seamless WPMU integration too!

  4. August 5, 2008

    James, I haven’t tried that, but what I’m finding is that much of the stuff that gets through is actually manually entered so that plugin wouldn’t stop it. I think the spammers are offshoring manual entry! They even have relevant and occasionally interesting things to say, but it’s still spam.

  5. August 5, 2008

    try the disqus module (your blog ate my earlier comment)

  6. August 5, 2008

    thanks. I’ll check it out.

    and sorry for the comment-eatage. Mollom isn’t performing too well after all. It’s letting a surprising number of spamments through, and apparently making some false positives as well. The spam is just a fact of life, but the false positives are pretty much unforgivable…

  7. August 6, 2008

    There aren\’t that many people using Mollom on WordPress yet. Make sure to provide feedback to Mollom and give it a few days to learn your site\’s spam.

  8. August 6, 2008

    I figured there wouldn’t be a tonne of WP-folk running a Drupal-oriented spamblocker (yet). I’m planning on giving Mollom a week – it’s got to do better than Akismet and SK2 were doing. I’d hate to have to resort to captcha shudder