Spam Comments

[CopperRain]

I had a question about how to protect my blog. On September 21st I wrote a post on my brand new blog and trackbacked a post on Seth Godin's blog. Up until then, the only person who had commented on my blog was my dad (lol). After then I have received several spam comments.
I wrote Seth and he said tracking back to his blog and receiving my first spam are totally unrelated.

I do find it too much of a coincidence that I write my very first track back, and receive spam, AND all the spam is comments on that one post I track backed, not any of my others.

I turned my comments feature off over the weekend and changed the post that I had once track backed to. I turned the comments back on and haven't received another spam-yet.

I am afraid to trackback again! LOL What can I do. I am not very savy with PHP so if someone suggests a plug-in, if they could provide instructions too!
Thanks

[Yaro]

Hi Lorri,

I'm almost certain that what happened was your blog wasn't being spammed before you trackbacked Seth because the spam bots didn't know your blog exists.

What happens is the automatic spam spiders/bots travel around the web and find blogs where they can leave their spam comments. Just like any spider they travel between blogs by surfing along comments and trackbacks - any link.

Before you trackbacked Seth you had no incoming links coming from a mainstream site, hence you were not exposed to spam. Seth site is seriously popular and no doubt gets a lot of comment spam (which is dealt with - more on this later) and as soon as you created that link from Seth's blog to yours you opened up the channel.

So essentially Seth isn't to blame - you are for leaving a link back to your site from his, but of course it's not your fault - it's all those stupid comment spammers.

How To Stop Blog Comment Spam

Unfortunately once your blog starts getting "out there" and you get more traffic you get more spam too. Leaving trackbacks is a good thing so you should keep doing it, you just need to find a way to stop the spam.

I personally use the SPAM Karma plugin for WordPress:

http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

There is also the Akismet plugin which comes default with WordPress.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

Outside of WordPress you need to look around. I know Typepad has an inbuilt anti-spam system and Blogger.com does too.

I hope that helps!

[CopperRain]

Thanks Yaro.
Yeah I figured it wasn't Seth's fault, just wanted to find out what he does then to stop his site, and he said he just turns his comments off.
I will try one of those plugins thanks!

[Blaine Moore]

Thanks Yaro.
Yeah I figured it wasn't Seth's fault, just wanted to find out what he does then to stop his site, and he said he just turns his comments off.
I will try one of those plugins thanks!
[/b]

I use a modified version of the akismet plugin, which groups frequent spammers together to make it easier to cull them out and then find false positives.

I also block the IP addresses of frequent spammers, which usually gives me a couple weeks of relatively little spam to wade through when I get around to it. Most of my spam usually comes from 2 or 3 sources at a time.

I also set the flag that requires I moderate a post the first time somebody comments so that something that gets through the spam filter still gets stopped before going live on the website.

[matte]

I tried the above but none worked efectively.
On my wordpress blog i use Anti Spam Image - it is one of those ones where you must enter characters on an image to post.
This has stopped spam dead
Googe anti spam image - it is the one by Krazy Nino from memory