Stopping the spam? a reverse great wall of China

April 18, 2008 · 7 Comments

As some of you might have noticed, if you have ever posted a comment on this blog, I have been having a number of spam comments being submitted. Since I am using captcha for each blog post, I think this is basically sweatshop workers in China being told to do it. (enyone watched JPod? same thing). There is no real way round this, since its humans doing it (or maybe install CFKismet or something?). The main point is, if I dont have any real readers in China, should I simply block all the IP's that come from there and put a proper message? What do you think? unfair? I think as a whole it would be, but then again, I dont get many *real* readers from there, speak up if you are though!

Tags: spam

7 responses so far ↓

1 Ben Nadel // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

I have noticed a big increase in what I think is human spamming lately. The spam comments actually refer to things in my post or to other comments people have posted. In fact, sometimes, I have a hard time even determining that something is spam (and I just have to trust my gut instinct). It's so FRUSTRATING!
2 Sammy Larbi // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

In addition to the normal spam prevention, I've started maintaining a list of "banned words" which cause comments to be denied if they contain them. It's just a list of urls I check for in the comment.

That said - your captcha is really weak - there are programs out that can break much more distorted ones. You might try something else. And I'd certainly start using akismet before banning all Chinese IPs.
3 jax // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

..or try the spamstop plug-in I developed for blogCFC.. :-)
4 Jim Priest // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

I'm on WordPress and very happy with Akismet. Looks like someone has hacked up a CFAkismet:

http://devnulled.com/cfakismet/

With WordPress this all goes in a 'possibly spam' bin which I review once a month and usually end up just deleting all of them.
5 Tom Chiverton // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

I seriously considered black holeing the whole or .ru and .cn in the past, to cut down email and blog spam.
It does seem over kill, though it would probably work, given that it looks like you can use services like Akismet even from CF.
You could try dialing Lyla up a notch too.
6 Nitai // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

To be honest we switched from blogCFC to Wordpress and since then no more SPAM. Aksimet and SpamFree do it very very well.

I would try CFakismet
7 Mark // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

I've changed my addcomments.cfm to be a Flex file and use remote objects to post it to a ColdFusion CFC on the server and removed my captcha image from the form, so far it's ok, but i'm considering adding CFakismet as soon as I get all the chinese spammers to my site, I do want to stay with blogCFC, i just like that it's ColdFusion and i can make changes if i want to.

Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

a compendium of railo, cfml, cfeclipse and technology topics