Joe Levi:
a cross-discipline, multi-dimensional problem solver who thinks outside the box – but within reality™

Comment Spam

It’s not often that I rant just for the sake of ranting, so, be forewarned, this is a rant.

This site, for those of you who don’t know, is powered by WordPress, a very easy, very powerful content management and ‘blogging engine. With its ubiquity come problems with people who want to push their agenda on the world.

Agendas are all fine and dandy, I don’t think they should be hidden like most agendas seem to be, but everyone is entitled to their own agenda. Now, when you agenda is to advertise your product as widely as possible and as cheaply as possible, that’s one thing. When your agenda is to push your spam sites that pushes someone else’s product and you do so by bulk inundation of another web site’s comments feature, well, that’s just stupid.

I use a two-fold approach to preventing comment spam. My first line of defense is Akismet for my anti-comment spam. They catch over 99% of all spam, never letting it bother my readers. For the less than 1% that’s “gotten through” I have WordPress set up to require that a comment poster must have a previously authorized comment before any of their comments will show up.

One would think that spammers would take a look and say “holy cripes! this guy doesn’t have any spam on his site, he’s probably got measures in place that will prevent my spam from getting through, it’s not worth my time to hit that guy,” but no… they just spam away. My Akismet has blocked over 1,700 spam comments, all without me doing a single thing.

So, here’s notice to you spammers: don’t waste your time here.

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