Dealing With Spambots

[Viktori]

I have a blog that's recently attracted a relentless spambot and it's made me activate my captcha on my blog comments. I find this terribly annoying and would like to finally be able to remove it for the convenience of my audience whom fortunately are active in participating with me in discussion via my comments section. I would like to ask if any of our members here have any ideas on how to better deal with these situations, and also when or if it will ever be safe for me to turn off captcha again.

 

[Spintax]

Wow! You've been lucky. I activate captcha/recaptcha plugins on day one. Combined with akismet, I make out pretty well -- provided I don't attract the attention of some Xrumer user. Then all bets are off and I'm fighting a lost battle :devilish:. I wouldn't remove the captcha. If your visitors put up too much of a fuss, then make membership a requirement to comment and use a solid captcha on your registration page.

 

[thebrad]

The best is admin email approval meaning admins need to activate there users it may annoy users but i bet people will understand its to stop them, all you need to know its a spambot is a name if there name is rtgderftredd then its most likely a spam bot.

 

[Viktori]

Wow! You've been lucky. I activate captcha/recaptcha plugins on day one. Combined with akismet, I make out pretty well -- provided I don't attract the attention of some Xrumer user. Then all bets are off and I'm fighting a lost battle :devilish:. I wouldn't remove the captcha. If your visitors put up too much of a fuss, then make membership a requirement to comment and use a solid captcha on your registration page.

I've never heard of aksimet before, thanks for that, I'll look into it further and hopefully it will help me as it has done you. I really want to turn off captcha again because I don't want to put my commenters and viewers through such an effort for a simple task, and hopefully once the spam lets up I'll get to.

 

[andi]

Akismet is a must about this problem. It's free and is very powerful. It's recommended for every blog or website. I personally installed it a month after creating my website, because I didn't know how to install Akismet, but when I did, I noticed the difference.

 

[Nymph]

What I find that appropriately remedies the problem while saving some convenience for visitors and other bloggers looking to comment is, one, keeping the Captcha on. I especially love the Captchas that involve reasoning problems that only a human can perform, and not those Captchas where you have to strain your eyes or stare at the code for a long time to figure out the answer, that a bot could actually potentially figure out. The next thing you need is a robust spam filter. Akismet is nice for Wordpress blogs, but what about the other kinds of sites not founded on Wordpress? One search for "spam filter" brings up a lot of good options, but the best of the best will be custom-scripted.

 

[BruceBanner]

Viktori, I think that the days of being able to go without captcha are pretty much over. Unfortunately, automated spammers have made them a necessity if you want to keep your sanity while keeping your real visitors happy. It's a good thing that there are free and cheap options available.

 

[deansaliba]

I use Akismet and GASP plugins on all my blogs, and it has helped a lot. The Akismet plugin is obviously a well known anti-spam plugin, but I use the GASP plugin as well because it forces the commentators to tick a box in order to submit their comment. With these two I still get spam, but it is MUCH lower amount and only from human spammers.

 

[Viktori]

Viktori, I think that the days of being able to go without captcha are pretty much over. Unfortunately, automated spammers have made them a necessity if you want to keep your sanity while keeping your real visitors happy. It's a good thing that there are free and cheap options available.

This is truly sad. Hopefully the tools suggested in this thread can serve as a good option or at the very least will prove to be helpful, which I'm sure it will since it seems to be universally recommended.

I use Akismet and GASP plugins on all my blogs, and it has helped a lot. The Akismet plugin is obviously a well known anti-spam plugin, but I use the GASP plugin as well because it forces the commentators to tick a box in order to submit their comment. With these two I still get spam, but it is MUCH lower amount and only from human spammers.

I will have to check out GASP as well, it sounds very useful. Thanks for the tip!