[Gluster-infra] Wordpress spam comments increasing... :(

Jeff Darcy jdarcy at redhat.com
Tue Sep 23 12:37:26 UTC 2014


> A lot more comment spam has started hitting our Wordpress
> installation over the last few days.  Instead of the general
> 5-10 per day, it's been ramping up to 20-30 a day.  Yesterday
> we had 100+.  (hoping that will drop off, but doubting it)
> 
> We already have the "Akismet" spam prevention plugin installed
> and activated.  It just seems like it's not doing a great
> job any more.
> 
> Anyone have practical ideas on how to combat this problem?

Auto-closing posts older than a certain age can help bring those numbers
back down, without affecting useful discussion.  IIRC this functionality
now exists in WordPress itself, but if not there are also plugins to do
it.  Unfortunately, my experience has been that CAPTCHAs don't work very
well.  It blocks the true bots, but there seem to be a surprising number
of humans (hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk or similar) who can get
past any reasonable CAPTCHA.  I ended up using an external comment
system on an otherwise static site, in part because of the spam.


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