Spam Karma 2 is in Effect
Slakethirst.com has been quietly running Spam Karma 2 for the past two weeks, and it seems to be doing a bang-up job. Historically, Slakethirst’s comment spam problem hasn’t been too bad — it’s only recently that much of anything came this way — so SK2’s rules are set at a fairly forgiving threshold. To date, the only false-positive has been a single trackback, which bodes very well for it distinguishing humans from bots. SK2 likes you much more if you have posted previously, so returning commenters are unlikely to feel its automated wrath. Returning spammers, conversely, are summarily blacklisted. If any well-intentioned commenter is blocked by SK2, please accept this preemptive apology, and know that your submission has been queued for review by human eyes within the day.
Beyond separating-out all of the proverbial chaff, one of the unexpected upsides of SK2 is its log. Where before one simply deleted spammy comments from the moderation queue, with SK2 their salient details are preserved for limited posterity, allowing trends to become evident. For example: the last 4 days’ worth of attempted comment spam have solely concerned themselves with exciting opportunities in the foreign exchange markets. Prior to that it was online shoe stores, a good long run of downloadable polyphonic ringtones, and great deals on personal loans. From the homogeneity of subject matter over the span of several days at a stretch, one might conclude that a single agency is responsible, and a not particularly successful one at that.
Tags: Blog
October 27th, 2005 at 2:10 am PDT (-0700)
N.B. As of yesterday, I’ve added Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet to the spam-fighting mix. Not that Spam Karma 2 has been anything less than fully-satisfactory, but Akismet is new and interesting, and Slakethirst runs on WordPress, so why the hell not?