Comment Spam
Since a couple of days my blog has been under attack of comment spam.
Since the beginning of this blog I had some comment spam. At first it was only one or two a week, which wasn’t that much of a problem. I looked into some possibilities to have a user-friendly way of stopping this. I ruled out CAPTCHAs, while these may be “friendly” to users who can see, they are not for the visually impaired, and besides, there are already programs that can do them about just as well as humans.
Then I encountered the Hashcash plugin for Wordpress. It provides the browser with a simple mathematical puzzle, which solved correctly, allows for the comment to be posted. Most browsers can do this without a problem, so that looked to be the solution.
After a while, comments again started to trickle in, first once or twice a week and the last couple of days it became more than 20 a day. I have now installed the (SpamKarma)[http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/] plugin (see the footer of the page), which does some filtering and other smart stuff to figure out if a comment is spam or not, once it has been posted. This (and Wordpress itself) is turning out to be a pretty heavy load for my poor little server, so I might soon have to look into other possibilities.
To have a frame of reference of how fast things are going with the comments, at the time of writing it has caught 117 comment spams. Most of those are from before, which I had either forgot about or were in the archive but not displayed.