Losing the spam wars
So most people will think I’m stupid for this, but so far I’ve been manually moderating nearly 100% of my comments. Basically, if you’ve made a comment I’ve approved in the past, all future comments from that same IP address will be posted without moderation. Everything else — both spam and new legitimate comments — goes directly into my moderation queue.
Up until recently, this was a big time suck but still manageable. As long as I cleaned out the queue once or twice a day, it was usually fine. Luckily, 90% of spam is easily spotted when quickly scrolling down a page. If I went more than a day without cleaning it out, I basically just had to mass delete the whole folder because it wasn’t worth it scrolling through 600 pieces of spam just for one or two legitimate comments.
But within the last week or two the volume of spam has stepped up another level, and so I don’t know how much longer I can go at this pace. I probably need to install some kind of CAPTCHA wordpress filter. And since I’ll already be doing that, I might as well upgrade my WordPress account, something I haven’t done in nearly two years.
Are you not running Akismet? Although I’m getting record volumes of blogspam recently, Akismet seems to be catching 99.99% of it. No need for a CAPTCHA.
Also, if you’re going to upgrade WordPress, I suggest that you go for whatever’s latest in the 2.4.x line. 2.5 was a huge step backwards in usability.
I used to scan everything in Akismet because every once in a blue moon, a real comment would be there. Not anymore — not worth the time. Now I spend most of my comment-approval time deciding whether an SEO’s comment is on-topic enough to approve even though they’re obviously trying to push a website. (Good luck, WP puts nofollow on all comments by default.)