Comments on: Teaching Akismet Part 1: I am Good

By: Pete S.

Pete S. — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:16:00 +0000

I’ve had really good luck with Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin — http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yawasp/

It changes the fields in the comment script form “author”, “url”, “email”, etc. to random values. These values change every 24 hours.

It also has a field that must remain empty (but that spambots will fill out).

The result is that the spammers are unable to properly submit their spam.

The empty field is hidden from human users, so there’s no way to accidentally break it.

To a human viewer, everything looks exactly the same as usual. The normal “Name”, “Email”, “Website” labels are next to the text fields. The only difference is the name of the fields on the backend.

So far, it’s been 100% effective for me. Woot.

(I have no relationship with the plugin author. I’m merely a satisfied user.)

By: ponykenobi

ponykenobi — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:31:26 +0000

Humph, you’ve changed my mind! Your arguments are convincing indeed. Despite I’m not a person who is easy to be convinced.

By: xsplat

xsplat — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:51:32 +0000

I’ve been trying for the last 2 hours to train Akismet, with no success. I even started a 2nd blog, using a proxy, and posted from my banned blog to that, dozens of times.

I’ve contacted Akismet twice. Sucks. Cant get unblocked.

By: Tom in Cala Dor Palma de Mallorca

Tom in Cala Dor Palma de Mallorca — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 13:20:09 +0000

The best way to stop spam would be to spend some time in moderating the comments persoanlly rather than relying on any captchas. You can go to the other extreme of not allowing anyone to comment - but then the whole essence of sharing information is lost. At least Yahoo and MSN rewards the commentators with relevant backlinks, so that is a reward which many spammers like to go for.

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:43:39 +0000

Yup, I use Bad Behaviour as well! I’ve had good luck with that as well (and only blacklisted myself once when playing with improperly user-agent’d RSS software! I have a knack for getting identified as a spammer, I guess.) The logging feature is particularly interesting.

I use Spam Poison as well, though I’m not sure how effective it really is.

And if anyone is looking for a spam-resistant shoutbox, I have to suggest this one:
http://pierre.sudarovich.free.fr/index.php/2006/02/28/ajax-shoutbox/

I installed it 3 or 4 days ago, and it’s already blocked 307 spam messages to my shoutbox (which seems to be oddly unprotected by Bad Behavior, I think. That’s for another day’s tinkering…).

By: deepthought

deepthought — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 23:05:48 +0000

I think the best is a combo of Akismet and Bad Behaviour. BB stops bots from repeatedly hammering away at your site. Akismet stops everything that gets through. Pretty formidable one-two punch. Do you use BB as well?

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 22:16:19 +0000

I’m still using Askimet as I was in the comment above (from May), and I honestly haven’t had that many false positives (other than the ones cause by multiple links in a single comment). I do find the system useful, and vastly prefer it to manually deleting comment spam.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 02:34:29 +0000

Very interesting article! I had considered enabling askimet on one of my blogs, but had been hesitant due to the black box issue you discuss. Your experiment would tend to indicate that a “true” comment spammer could just run the same proces you did on their own blogs and get back in the good graces of the box. If it is that easy to defeat and has a tendency to incorrectly ban legitimate posters then I don’t see it would be something I would want to use.

By: GoTeamsGo Fan Forum

GoTeamsGo Fan Forum — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 02:46:33 +0000

Akismet False Positive…

After installing a real cool trackback/pingback option into our vbulletin forum software, I set up a Wordpress blog to test it. When it didn’t work like I expected, I dug into my WordPress dashboard &……

By: harc a spam kommentek ellen - kobak pont org

harc a spam kommentek ellen - kobak pont org — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:22:50 +0000

[...] akismet - sokan használjuk. Előnye, hogy könnyű telepíteni. Regisztrálni kell a wordpress.com oldalon, majd az ott kapott egyedi kulcsot megadni. Kész. Működik. A baj vele az, hogy nem sok befolyásunk lehet arra, hogy mit jelöl spamnek, s mit nem. Sokan egy fekete dobozhoz hasonlítják. Többeknek meggyűlt már emiatt a baja, s váltottak más spam filterre (pl.: Kelt, Maxpower) [...]

By: Enseñando a Akismet at molgar.net

Enseñando a Akismet at molgar.net — Tue, 16 May 2006 06:27:04 +0000

[...] le ha pasado a Kirk Montgomery, que aquÃ nos lo cuenta, y relata cÃ³mo ha podido zafarse de la etiqueta de spammer. akismet,spam [...]

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 02 May 2006 20:14:44 +0000

With my luck this will end up marked as spam. [editors note, it did]

On my own blog (which I and others post on) Akismet keeps blocking my comments to other people’s posts. I’ll set them as ‘Not Spam’ a few times, and it’ll start letting them through again. Skip ahead a few days, I’m blocked again.

From when it appears to start blocking me, I can only assume Akismet doesn’t like people posting multiple links in comments. Which I like to do

I’m glad I’m not the only one with this problem! Thanks for writing this.

By: Teaching Akismet Part 2: You are bad. at MaxPower

Teaching Akismet Part 2: You are bad. at MaxPower — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:06:05 +0000

[...] This article continues down the same path as Teaching Akismet Part 1: I am good with a look at how Akismet could be used for nefarious purposes. In the first post we learned that user input determines what Akismet thinks is spam. In this article, that idea is expanded in order to teach akismet to be bad. Below are listed three potential applications of the idea that Akismet can be taught things. [...]

By: deepthought

deepthought — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:33:06 +0000

Hmmm interesting, thanks for leaving a comment. I didn’t teach Akismet anything about trackbacks yet.

By: Angsuman Chakraborty

Angsuman Chakraborty — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:18:58 +0000

Your trackback comment was marked as spam on my blog. I approved it.