December 10, 2006Anti Spam Report
Comments (4) Since I started using Akismet it has blocked nearly 1,000 spam comments (985, to be exact, as I type this). However that number would be well over 1,000 if I had not implemented some of my own custom anti-spam measures last month.
To date there have been an additional 282 comments blocked that are either from robot comment posters or by users that didn’t notice the “confirm comment” checkbox. That’s a quarter of what Akismet has blocked since the beginning of this blog, and just since the 22nd of November. 
Another common technique of spammers is to skip the regular posting process and go directly to the comments page; I’ve blocked 114 of those since the same date. That’s now 396 spam comments that never even made it to Akismet.
In December I added code to reject comments over a certain size, and that feature has blocked another 45 spams. Now we’re over 400 spam comments blocked. I’m going to reduce the comment size from where it is now down ever further; I expect that will remove even more work for Akismet.
Why did I do all of this? For two reasons… first, my spam queue was filling up with crap. Over a 24 hour period I would have 30 or more comments to reject, and it just got tiring. The other reason? To see what sort of measures I could get away with and still manage to have reasonable comments by reasonable humans. And some less than reasonable ones too. 
Comments (4)
Those are great results! One suggestion though, in order to not harm your actual commenters you should add a little note under the textarea imo.
Comment by eviL<3 — December 11, 2006 @ 1:11 pm
I’m happy to take any suggestions, especially for an active non-spam commenter such as yourself.
But what are you expecting the note to say? Something about the size limit?
The reason I ask is the checkbox is already marked as “Confirm submission” so I would think that’s fairly clear. And it’s right above the button, so I hope it’s not too subtle. For those folks (like me) that prefer to use the tab key, I made sure that the tab index was set properly so that you tab from the comment text input to the checkbox (spacebar to mark the comment checkbox) and tab to the button (spacebar to activate the button) and I’m done.
BTW, you can (I believe) enter your full name if you use the html code for the less than sign, it would be & l t ; without the spaces, as in evil<3. I fixed this one.
Comment by dave.rathbun — December 11, 2006 @ 8:52 pm
Hit 999 Akismet blocked spams just a few moments ago.
Comment by dave.rathbun — December 13, 2006 @ 7:21 pm
And a milestone: 1000 spam comments trapped by Akismet since the blog launched in May of this year.
Comment by dave.rathbun — December 13, 2006 @ 10:24 pm