Manual Comment Spam
Posted on Wednesday, the 14th of October, 2009.
Some time last year I installed a CAPTCHA tool on this site, in an attempt to mitigate the deluge of spam comments that I was receiving.
It has actually been very successful: despite some fairly concerted attempts, since that date, I don't think any automated spam has got through.
What I am seeing, however, is a steady increase in the amount of manual spam. By this I mean actual human people coming to the site and entering inane comments promoting various seedy businesses. I guess hiring kids or the unemployed to do this is no more expensive than hiring people to hand out flyers in the street - and you see plenty of that.
So I'd be interested to hear if other bloggers are seeing this, and how they tend to deal with it.
In the meantime, if you are among this type of spammer, I'll politely ask you to move along elsewhere: I'll only delete your comment and block your IP, and it'll become quite tiresome for all of us. william@geeksltd.co.uk, that includes you, though I suspect that's a made up address.
Normal service will now be resumed, and I promise that my next post will contain some real content!
Posted by Russell on Thursday, the 15th of October, 2009.
Hi Simon,
Well I really don't like any type of captcha solution. I understand it is a useful tool for the site owner but as a user I just can't stand them.
I prefer to use a two step process. The first step is to analyse the submitted comment to see if anything dodgy is going on, checking for suspicious words, email addresses and if the comment contains a link.
If the comment looks like possible spam I then ask them to perform a check to prove they are human. You may prefer captcha at this point, I prefer a simple question / answer.
I never get automated spam but as you say human spam is much more difficult to control.
Given the time I am sure that a more intelligent system could be created whereby only people who had commented before would be whitelisted, allowed to have urls in their posts etc. In reality though such as system is too much effort for what it is worth for most bloggers building their own system.
It is also worth mentioning services like akismet, again probs not very useful for detecting human generated spam.
Now, I will just fill out your annoying captcha and submit this comment! ;)