While back I wrote about this anti-spam plugin I’m using on kozen.de. In recent weeks the number of spam comments that plugin is flagging every day has increased dramatically. Have a look:
Spam comments flagged by Antispam Bee
I find this quite interesting and am wondering why that number goes up? Is it because my blog gets more and more indexed by search engines and therefore more spambots are finding it? For sure, the number of visits per day on kozen.de has not increased significantly.
Perhaps there are a bunch of people who don’t like what I write and they’ve submitted this site to spam databases. Yes that kind a thing exists. Or is it perhaps that the WordPress version I have installed is by a 0.0.1 version below the latest WordPress version. Thus, spam bots are finding it as an attractive target to leave their spam comments?
By the way: Most spam comments are detected as “honeypots“. So just in case one of such comments gets through: Before clicking on a link, please double-check that link in your browser’s status bar (when hovering over the link with your mouse) to ensure it’s the right destination you want to go to.
I recently re-launched this blog and for quite some years I have been having problems with spam. This blog is powered by WordPress — probably the most popular blog software out there. It is a popular target for spammers and other attachers who want to spread their “news”. Since the inception of this blog 13+ years ago, I’ve been receiving a lot of spam comments.
Spam Comments on kozen.de
To fight off that spam, I’ve installed a plug-in called “Spam Karma” many years ago. It was working quite well, but for some reason it has stopped working. That’s probably related to the fact that the developer stopped maintaining it quite some years ago.
WordPress has its own spam fighting plug-in, which ships with WordPress by default. However, that’s built on top of an online service that you need to subscribe to. To have any significant spam fighting result, that subscription costs money. I can understand why they’re charging for their service as it keeps its database up-to-date with all the typical spam phrases, keywords, methods, etc. that those really creative spammers come up with. Yet, I believe there are a lot of other techniques that can be deployed before having to look at those real-time databases to catch the latest spam.
In fact, almost all spam I receive is always the same kind of stuff. There’s pharmaceutical products, health product, online products/services/websites, etc. To the naked eye comments relating such topics can be easily identified as spam. It’s not just the content, but also the way how these comments are composed, how their authors are called, what their backlink links to, etc.
So I ended up using a different anti-spam plug-in called “Antispam Bee” and as a form of saying “Thank you” to the author, I’m writing this blog post. I hope they are getting more people using their plug-in. It seems to work fine for me so far. The chart above shows the number of spam my antispam bee is collecting by day. It’s not that many at the moment, but if you add this up over the year, I would end up with thousands of spam comments, which I simply don’t have the time to process manually.
So again, a special thanks to the developers of Antispam Bee. Great job!
If someone of you is in the need of a spam fighting plug-in. Give the Antispam Bee a try. It works well for me.
Ich hatte mich gerade mal wieder bei meinem Hong Kong’er Google AdSense Account eingeloggt. Heute erschien dort zum ersten mal so ein toller Screen, wo man sich zu Newslettern und so weiter anmelden kann. Mir war neu, dass Google jetzt im Spam-Business ist … also habe ich das mal lieber gelassen 🙂
Noch mehr EMails muss ja nun wirklich nicht sein.
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So I ended up using a different anti-spam plug-in called “