45,025 comments! I’m so popular!
June 12, 2009 – 6:07 pm by Griffin Hammond
When hundreds of spam comments flood your blog everyday, that’s the kind of discouragement that will keep you, the author, from returning, let alone posting, very often. What’s worse is when spambots simultaneously attack your wiki site as well.
Losing the will to continually sift through all the spam, I’ve neglected Media Socialist for four months, and devoid of human presence, the site has been rampant with lifeless, blog-sucking leeches. They made hundreds of link-filled edits to the Media Socialist Wiki, and left 45,025 (likely Cialis-selling) comments on the blog, hundreds of which passed through Akismet, WordPress‘ built-in spam filter. (And those numbers don’t include the hundreds, perhaps thousands I manually deleted.)
“Why me?” I cried. “The owner of an insignificant blog that no one reads?! Don’t these spammers realize there’s no one here to click their links?”
Fortunately, there’s a solution! And one week after it’s implementation, not one spam footprint on this blog or wiki. It’s like I lit a Citronella candle on the homepage!
Bad Behavior, created by Michael Hampton, is a PHP-based spam killer that appears to work very well. It’s a simple plug-in install for the blog, and a fairly simple upload to my MediaWiki-based wiki server. I’m just impressed that one solution fixed both my spam problems!
