Puppet Slam 2008

The comment spammers here have already made some remarkable strides. I don’t know what kind of Pagerank they think I have. I used to have some, maybe they assume I still got it, I don’t know. I’ve tried a bunch of non-intrusive methods of blocking spam in the past. I really don’t want to mess with the ‘user experience’. On my old blog, I tried for IPs and certain phrases/links, but that was too easily tricked. More recently, a few days ago I added some code to prevent comments coming from users with blank “user agent” strings (that would say you’re posting from Firefox on Windows, or Safari on OS X, for example) from posting, thinking that the spam was coming from scripts that would have no user agent. But, they’re either coming from people in browsers, or with a faked user agent string. One purportedly came from a computer running Windows 95, through Internet Explorer 4.

So now, I’ve installed Akismet as a spam filter, and we’ll see how that goes. I’m not deleting comments detected as spam, just marking them as ‘invisible’, so I can keep a close eye out for false positives and false negatives. This is as far as I can go without changing the comment form, but if I have a single false positive then that’s just what I’ll do. My friend John uses the CHOCHANG approach to spam filtering and that’s probably where I’d go. Oh look at me announcing my attentions to the spammers! But maybe I won’t use the name CHOCHANG spammers, maybe I’d use FAXOFLIFE. Damn it I did it again!

Does anybody have other ideas for spam filtering that don’t involve changing my comment form at all? Anyway, just, er, don’t sign your name Viagra, or I’m pretty sure your comment will be instantly blocked.

Update: It’s already working, blocked 5 spam comments in the last 9 hours.