Comment Spam discussed at Northern Voice

February 10, 2006 By

Maryam and I are at the Northern Voice conference. Today is “MooseCamp” and Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress) is leading a discussion about comment spam. But, coming into the session he mentioned that he already has 90,000 WordPress.com blogs (including mine). That’s very cool, but I heard yesterday from someone who works with MySpace that they are seeing 220,000 new MySpaces opening up EVERY DAY. Whew!

I also asked when his “pro” features are gonna come up (like the ability to change your design) and he said they are coming soon. He said that his service got popular faster than he expected so that he’s behind.

Regarding the spam, by the way, he says he’s seeing a whole new kind of spam. Social hacking spam. Spam that gets the blogger to think it’s a real comment. For instance, some of the comment spam that WordPress is blocking today from getting on my blog is this one: “Do you provide a blog feed subscription for this blog so I can get it via email?”

He says this is actually fooling quite a few of the bloggers on his system (they mark it as “not spam” even though it is). Why? Cause it isn’t obvious spam.

There’s a whole war going on over getting onto bloggers’ comments. It makes me wonder if Russell Beattie doesn’t have the right idea by getting rid of comments altogether.

Matt designed a whole company to stop spam named Akismet. Matt is freaking brilliant. I love how his system blocks spam.

Filed Under: Blog Tips
Newer Comments →
  • http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com/ Jack Krupansky

    Why not use simple graphic word verification, like even Blogger does now? Maybe there is some better scheme coming down the pike, but it does seem awfully effective, for now. It doesn’t add that big a burden on us users and it does seem to be *extremely* effective at blocking spam-bots. Has anybody had any experience where automated spammers get past graphic word verficiation schemes?

    If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go and try to comment on one of my Blogger blogs. Even better, send your spam-bot and have *it* try. (No fair trying to pretend that you’re a spam-bot.)

    – Jack Krupansky

  • http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com Jack Krupansky

    Why not use simple graphic word verification, like even Blogger does now? Maybe there is some better scheme coming down the pike, but it does seem awfully effective, for now. It doesn’t add that big a burden on us users and it does seem to be *extremely* effective at blocking spam-bots. Has anybody had any experience where automated spammers get past graphic word verficiation schemes?

    If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go and try to comment on one of my Blogger blogs. Even better, send your spam-bot and have *it* try. (No fair trying to pretend that you’re a spam-bot.)

    – Jack Krupansky

  • Pingback: Make You Go Hmm: » Mullenweg on Comment spam

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    Jack: Matt explained why: he has blind friends and even he can’t read them a lot.

  • http://www.osilla.com/ Ryan

    Askimet is hands down the best system for spam comments out there. I’m wondering though, what else is out there for non wordpress blogs?

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    Jack: Matt explained why: he has blind friends and even he can’t read them a lot.

  • http://www.osilla.com Ryan

    Askimet is hands down the best system for spam comments out there. I’m wondering though, what else is out there for non wordpress blogs?

  • http://www.geocities.com/mvaneerde Maurits

    Checking URLs in comments against a URL blacklist like SURBL* would solve this.

    * http://www.surbl.org/

  • http://www.geocities.com/mvaneerde Maurits

    Checking URLs in comments against a URL blacklist like SURBL* would solve this.

    * http://www.surbl.org/

  • http://jaseone.wordpress.com/ jaseone

    Captchas aren’t accessible even often for people that have 20/20 vision, I don’t know how many times I have gotten Ticketmaster’s captchas wrong and they also add a barrier to people commenting, which might make them not want to bother.

    Blacklists always seem to end up with sites listed that shouldn’t be listed and the owner of the site has to take it up with the blacklist maintainer to get taken off the blacklist and often they aren’t aware they are on such a list for a long period of time.

    I haven’t made up my mind about Akismet yet, I don’t like the fact that every comment has to be filtered through a remote service so I’d like to see more of Akismet integrated locally in a blog install and then for only fuzzies to be sent through to Akismet for further classification.

    That is why I used to like SpamKarma2 as it wasn’t a remote service and it was pretty damn effective as well, I disabled it when an incompatibility was introduced in WP 2.0 development, I’ve been meaning to look into whether there is a 2.0 compatibile version or not yet.

  • http://jaseone.wordpress.com/ jaseone

    Captchas aren’t accessible even often for people that have 20/20 vision, I don’t know how many times I have gotten Ticketmaster’s captchas wrong and they also add a barrier to people commenting, which might make them not want to bother.

    Blacklists always seem to end up with sites listed that shouldn’t be listed and the owner of the site has to take it up with the blacklist maintainer to get taken off the blacklist and often they aren’t aware they are on such a list for a long period of time.

    I haven’t made up my mind about Akismet yet, I don’t like the fact that every comment has to be filtered through a remote service so I’d like to see more of Akismet integrated locally in a blog install and then for only fuzzies to be sent through to Akismet for further classification.

    That is why I used to like SpamKarma2 as it wasn’t a remote service and it was pretty damn effective as well, I disabled it when an incompatibility was introduced in WP 2.0 development, I’ve been meaning to look into whether there is a 2.0 compatibile version or not yet.

  • http://www.icemark.com/blog Chris Wild

    Adding a text entry verification on my blog has reduced comment spam to ZERO – I was seeing hundreds a day once my site had been picked up by a few bots.

    I wrote a simple plugin to my wordpress blog that goes…

    “enter the nth word from the following sentence” – where nth changes every hit.

    However all my spam is now coming through trackbacks and pings. I moderate them to filter out. I do notice that I get peak hits: 50/60 spam trackbacks one day and then nothing for weeks!

  • http://www.icemark.com/blog Chris Wild

    Adding a text entry verification on my blog has reduced comment spam to ZERO – I was seeing hundreds a day once my site had been picked up by a few bots.

    I wrote a simple plugin to my wordpress blog that goes…

    “enter the nth word from the following sentence” – where nth changes every hit.

    However all my spam is now coming through trackbacks and pings. I moderate them to filter out. I do notice that I get peak hits: 50/60 spam trackbacks one day and then nothing for weeks!

  • http://peterdawson.typepad.com/ /pd

    removing comments is a bad thing…then open conversations cannot occur. Not everyone blogs .. there are those who just dont blog, but rather furiously troll around and post legit comments and ideas..

    Blog Platforms need to have the methods to counter spam and also the naturally the idea of “blogspam” in a new legal way also needs to be crafted..

  • http://peterdawson.typepad.com /pd

    removing comments is a bad thing…then open conversations cannot occur. Not everyone blogs .. there are those who just dont blog, but rather furiously troll around and post legit comments and ideas..

    Blog Platforms need to have the methods to counter spam and also the naturally the idea of “blogspam” in a new legal way also needs to be crafted..

  • http://www.msmvps.com/ Matt Gerlach, Xbox MVP

    We had alot of Xbox.com users open up MSN Spaces (I think Jan 26th or 27th), the day the Xbox360 Live Integration with MSN Spaces launched.

    I feel like MSN Spaces get alot of hits a day.

  • http://www.msmvps.com Matt Gerlach, Xbox MVP

    We had alot of Xbox.com users open up MSN Spaces (I think Jan 26th or 27th), the day the Xbox360 Live Integration with MSN Spaces launched.

    I feel like MSN Spaces get alot of hits a day.

  • http://steph.wordpress.com/ Steph

    I like telling kids at the talks I do that when I started blogging, back in 2000, comments didn’t exist (well… barely existed). I was one of the first in my blogging circle to install a commenting script on my blog, and I remember how excited we all were about it. A new kind of user feedback, different from e-mails and referring links!

    Now, many people can’t imagine a blog without comments. Well, we could have conversations from blog to blog without comments. We can use Technorati, PubSub, Bloglines and the like to see who is answering our blog posts. But that would require each blogger to be very active in checking out if what he/she wrote started a conversation somewhere.

    What I noticed too is that comments really speed up the conversations. And we also start talking about stuff or adding reactions which at first don’t seem important enough to deserve a blog post. And sometimes these little things lead to bigger things.

    So, let’s forget about “removing commenting” as a solution to comment spam. We can be smarter than that.

  • http://steph.wordpress.com/ Steph

    I like telling kids at the talks I do that when I started blogging, back in 2000, comments didn’t exist (well… barely existed). I was one of the first in my blogging circle to install a commenting script on my blog, and I remember how excited we all were about it. A new kind of user feedback, different from e-mails and referring links!

    Now, many people can’t imagine a blog without comments. Well, we could have conversations from blog to blog without comments. We can use Technorati, PubSub, Bloglines and the like to see who is answering our blog posts. But that would require each blogger to be very active in checking out if what he/she wrote started a conversation somewhere.

    What I noticed too is that comments really speed up the conversations. And we also start talking about stuff or adding reactions which at first don’t seem important enough to deserve a blog post. And sometimes these little things lead to bigger things.

    So, let’s forget about “removing commenting” as a solution to comment spam. We can be smarter than that.

  • http://www.engineblog.com/ Mark Scholl

    I turned the comments off on my blog a long time ago. I figure so many people have blogs these days, they can express love/hate for my post their blog and trackback to me. That way they still show up under the post, but they have to own their own comments.

  • http://www.engineblog.com Mark Scholl

    I turned the comments off on my blog a long time ago. I figure so many people have blogs these days, they can express love/hate for my post their blog and trackback to me. That way they still show up under the post, but they have to own their own comments.

  • MGB

    Comments on or off?

    Well… you can either talk with people or talk at them.

    Or to put it another way…

    People with a whole lot to say and yet leaves little room or time for anyone elses opinion, usually aren’t worth listening to in the first place.

  • MGB

    Comments on or off?

    Well… you can either talk with people or talk at them.

    Or to put it another way…

    People with a whole lot to say and yet leaves little room or time for anyone elses opinion, usually aren’t worth listening to in the first place.

  • Pingback: Greg Yardley’s Internet Blog » Top five comment spammer tricks

  • http://steph.wordpress.com/ Steph

    Mark: would you have posted that in your blog if Robert had comments turned off? :-)

  • http://steph.wordpress.com/ Steph

    Mark: would you have posted that in your blog if Robert had comments turned off? :-)

  • http://poetslife.blogspot.com/ Bruce Curley

    http://poetslife.blogspot.com/

    I just wrote a review of your book on my blog. You can find it at the above address. As the book deserves, it is a very positive highlight of your work. Hope I got it right. If you see any errors, please let me know and I will fix them.

  • http://poetslife.blogspot.com/ Bruce Curley

    http://poetslife.blogspot.com/

    I just wrote a review of your book on my blog. You can find it at the above address. As the book deserves, it is a very positive highlight of your work. Hope I got it right. If you see any errors, please let me know and I will fix them.

  • Riva

    If comments didn’t have clickable links in the first place then the whole problem would be dramatically reduced already. Something anyone can just click on is going to be one big invitation for spammers to abuse, while it doesn’t add any value to the blog.

    I can imagine that Robert is interested to see the sites or blogs of others who regularly post comments, but as a reader the only thing I care about are his posts, at a distant second would to review other people’s thoughts based on their comments but in no way do I honestly care or ever bother to see what a commenter’s link leads to. Disabling comment links for anyone but a blog’s owner seems to be a reasonable middle ground.

    I also know that it also helps search engine rankings to be linked from as many sites as possible, but again I fail to see how this adds any value. If the only reason someone pitches in is because it earns them another link, then their contribution will be of little value to begin with.

    In my opinion the solution isn’t to make it increasingly more difficult to comment (captchas, email verification, signing up, etc), but to simply remove any incentive for spammers to abuse them.

  • Riva

    If comments didn’t have clickable links in the first place then the whole problem would be dramatically reduced already. Something anyone can just click on is going to be one big invitation for spammers to abuse, while it doesn’t add any value to the blog.

    I can imagine that Robert is interested to see the sites or blogs of others who regularly post comments, but as a reader the only thing I care about are his posts, at a distant second would to review other people’s thoughts based on their comments but in no way do I honestly care or ever bother to see what a commenter’s link leads to. Disabling comment links for anyone but a blog’s owner seems to be a reasonable middle ground.

    I also know that it also helps search engine rankings to be linked from as many sites as possible, but again I fail to see how this adds any value. If the only reason someone pitches in is because it earns them another link, then their contribution will be of little value to begin with.

    In my opinion the solution isn’t to make it increasingly more difficult to comment (captchas, email verification, signing up, etc), but to simply remove any incentive for spammers to abuse them.

  • http://jaseone.wordpress.com/ jaseone

    What about to point to other resources though? Commenting is about sharing information with the author and part of that information often involves a link to another resource so removing links would prevent that. Now if you allowed links but kept them as plain text it would still allow the references to be mentioned but at the same time the spammers would still to exploit it anyway.

    Heck even without links I think spammers would still spam comments, a lot of the spam comments I get already link to sites that don’t even exist, which leads me to wonder why they even bother but it happens…

  • http://jaseone.wordpress.com/ jaseone

    What about to point to other resources though? Commenting is about sharing information with the author and part of that information often involves a link to another resource so removing links would prevent that. Now if you allowed links but kept them as plain text it would still allow the references to be mentioned but at the same time the spammers would still to exploit it anyway.

    Heck even without links I think spammers would still spam comments, a lot of the spam comments I get already link to sites that don’t even exist, which leads me to wonder why they even bother but it happens…

  • http://photomatt.net/ Matt

    Jaseone, they register the domains that get through the filters later.

  • http://photomatt.net/ Matt

    Jaseone, they register the domains that get through the filters later.

  • Christopher Coulter

    Hahhh, it can’t scale. Russ has the right to do with whatever he wants with his blog, as do you, no Blog Police State rule about running comments. Just with you, you know, publishing a whole BOOK on ‘conversations’ and telling the world the value of “comments”, if you were to take that tact, well you’d be a hypocrite. Which is why, me and other detractors, that see beyond the Bloggie and Redmond Reality Distortion Zone are but ‘necessary evils’. But I find most bloggers that pretend preach “conversations” don’t actually want that, they want fan-clubs. Least you aren’t an agressive ‘spam’ moderator (credit where credit due), I am finding on some blogs, spam and critics are but one and the same. Funny that. ;)

  • Christopher Coulter

    Hahhh, it can’t scale. Russ has the right to do with whatever he wants with his blog, as do you, no Blog Police State rule about running comments. Just with you, you know, publishing a whole BOOK on ‘conversations’ and telling the world the value of “comments”, if you were to take that tact, well you’d be a hypocrite. Which is why, me and other detractors, that see beyond the Bloggie and Redmond Reality Distortion Zone are but ‘necessary evils’. But I find most bloggers that pretend preach “conversations” don’t actually want that, they want fan-clubs. Least you aren’t an agressive ‘spam’ moderator (credit where credit due), I am finding on some blogs, spam and critics are but one and the same. Funny that. ;)

  • Pingback: Presentation Response « Akismet

  • http://www.psynixis.com/blog/ Simon Brocklehurst

    Akismet works well to combat comment spam on blogs. But, so do algorithms that are trivial. For example, the following spam-catching algorithm is probably better than 98% accuate:

    if ( (number of links in comment >= 2) or (comment includes “casino” or “roulette”) ) then it’s SPAM

  • http://www.psynixis.com/blog/ Simon Brocklehurst

    Akismet works well to combat comment spam on blogs. But, so do algorithms that are trivial. For example, the following spam-catching algorithm is probably better than 98% accuate:

    if ( (number of links in comment >= 2) or (comment includes “casino” or “roulette”) ) then it’s SPAM

  • http://steph.wordpress.com/ Steph

    Riva: that’s what nofollow is about…

  • http://steph.wordpress.com/ Steph

    Riva: that’s what nofollow is about…

  • http://www.richbrownell.com/ Richard Brownell

    Having no comments is the easy way out. My blog doesn’t get enough traffic to warrant any kind of spam blocking measures. I have the ability to remove posts in case I get a spam or three.

    On my professional sites though, they all have commenting and get tens of thousands of unique visitors a day? Thus far they have all gotten 0 spam. I require users to be logged in to comment and it is a 100% effective solution. Does it prevent conversations? Well, the frequent articles the receive over 200 comments would disagree with that notion.

  • http://www.richbrownell.com Richard Brownell

    Having no comments is the easy way out. My blog doesn’t get enough traffic to warrant any kind of spam blocking measures. I have the ability to remove posts in case I get a spam or three.

    On my professional sites though, they all have commenting and get tens of thousands of unique visitors a day? Thus far they have all gotten 0 spam. I require users to be logged in to comment and it is a 100% effective solution. Does it prevent conversations? Well, the frequent articles the receive over 200 comments would disagree with that notion.

  • http://glpelletier.wordpress.com/ Guy Pelletier

    The “No Comments” suggestion is not what blogging is about. The essential part of blogging is 2 way conversation, as several people have said, this idea needs to go away.
    Spam is a fact of life, as long as businesses can get a result from force feed advertising then we will see it in our snail mail through our web based logging.
    Technology gave us this ability and it will give us the solution.

  • http://glpelletier.wordpress.com/ Guy Pelletier

    The “No Comments” suggestion is not what blogging is about. The essential part of blogging is 2 way conversation, as several people have said, this idea needs to go away.
    Spam is a fact of life, as long as businesses can get a result from force feed advertising then we will see it in our snail mail through our web based logging.
    Technology gave us this ability and it will give us the solution.

  • http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com/ Jack Krupansky

    Scoble says… “Matt explained why: he has blind friends and even he can’t read them a lot.”

    I’m sorry, but the word “lame”, “lame”, “lame”, … keeps echoing in my head.

    For the blind: just have a link next to the graphic labeled “Speak the code word”. Granted, that won’t help those who are blind *and* deaf, but they can’t use text-to-speech aids anyway, right?

    And, does Matt *really* have blind friends who are reading blogs?

    I’ve only had two occasions where I misread the graphic words.

    lame, lame, lame,…

    Can anybody come up with a better reason?

    Has anybody Ask[ed] Dave Taylor if his simple math test blocks all spam?

    Face it, this is one area where even Blogger is *superior* to WordPress. [Sorry, I just had to say it!]

    – Jack Krupansky

  • http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com Jack Krupansky

    Scoble says… “Matt explained why: he has blind friends and even he can’t read them a lot.”

    I’m sorry, but the word “lame”, “lame”, “lame”, … keeps echoing in my head.

    For the blind: just have a link next to the graphic labeled “Speak the code word”. Granted, that won’t help those who are blind *and* deaf, but they can’t use text-to-speech aids anyway, right?

    And, does Matt *really* have blind friends who are reading blogs?

    I’ve only had two occasions where I misread the graphic words.

    lame, lame, lame,…

    Can anybody come up with a better reason?

    Has anybody Ask[ed] Dave Taylor if his simple math test blocks all spam?

    Face it, this is one area where even Blogger is *superior* to WordPress. [Sorry, I just had to say it!]

    – Jack Krupansky

  • http://htmlfixit.com/ Don

    I have found the combination of bad_behavior (also available for other than wordPress) together with Akismet (seems to work fine for me in WP 2.0.1) to be a good combination.

    Spam won’t be necessary if we will all just plug stuff on our blogs in exchange for free stuff anyway … oh wait that was yesterdays topic here :-)

  • http://htmlfixit.com Don

    I have found the combination of bad_behavior (also available for other than wordPress) together with Akismet (seems to work fine for me in WP 2.0.1) to be a good combination.

    Spam won’t be necessary if we will all just plug stuff on our blogs in exchange for free stuff anyway … oh wait that was yesterdays topic here :-)

  • http://jaseone.wordpress.com/ jaseone

    Scoble says… “Matt explained why: he has blind friends and even he can’t read them a lot.”

    I’m sorry, but the word “lame”, “lame”, “lame”, … keeps echoing in my head.

    Ever heard of something called Section 508?

    For the blind: just have a link next to the graphic labeled “Speak the code word”. Granted, that won’t help those who are blind *and* deaf, but they can’t use text-to-speech aids anyway, right?

    Uhm for text-to-speech to work there would have to be some text and well that would kind of defeat the point of having a captcha…

    Face it, this is one area where even Blogger is *superior* to WordPress. [Sorry, I just had to say it

    Well at least I am able to post this comment here first go unlike on your blogger site where it took me several times for it to load the comments page without throwing an error.

    Captchas are old, VERY OLD technology and are just annoying more than anything else.

Newer Comments →