One major factor why I prefer gmail over other email services (especially Yahoo! Mail) is how it fights spam.
Tag Spam
New Theme
With the employment of this new theme (Tech-o-Crunch), I’m really worried whether my challenge plugin will work fine.
I’m encouraging everyone to do drop me a line in the comments (after answering the math quiz, of course) so I can better test the functionality of the challenge plugin, and whether it is effective in capturing preventing spam comments.
Please, I need your help. My blog is flooded with spams!
A Math Challenge Plugin
Spam comments has always been a problem in the blogosphere. Akismet and Spam Karma 2 are two of the most common spam protection plugins for wordpress blogs. What these plugins do, however, is simply catch spam comments and put them in queue for the administrator’s moderation.
Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments, promoting commercial services, to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly-accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.
Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.
Source: wikipedia
Spam comments are usually done through a program and/or machines. They are normally automatic once they’ve bookmarked your site. Now, although Akismet and Spam Karma 2 catch those spams and prevent them from being posted directly to your comments, they do not prevent them from reaching your comments (worse, they don’t cook them for breakfast! hehe). They help keep spam from being published, but not from reaching your comments.
As a result, you’ll need to check your admin panel regularly and browse through the captured spam comments for any erroneous catch. This is surely irritating, especially if you’re encountering an average of 10 to 20 spams per day (much worse is the case for other more popular sites).
Has Akismet Really Been Smart?
I don’t know about you but at least in the last six months I received comments obviously are spam past through Akismet anti-spam filters. Even the akismet stats, I don’t think they’re telling the truth about how many spam they missed –the ones I manually marked as spam. The numbers are just definitely way off the count that I everyday mark as spam.
The missed spam –these are comments that all have to only say, “they liked my website”, “I have the best website”, “they’ve subscribed to my RSS feeds”, and sometimes asking “they can’t understand how to subscribe to my rss feeds”, without adding any single value whatsoever to what my post was about to which they are commenting. They are usually coupled with strange names and url’s or domain names that looked really bogus (e.g. insurance, some medical drugs, etc.).
So do I, now what? Do you want me to visit yours? No way!
Really? I hope you enjoy more!
Or maybe, the reason these comments go past the Akismet filters is because other people just simply approve them for their own blogs without second thoughts. And Akismet is left confused, don’t know what to do with the same ip address, name, email address, and website url.
Yeah, I’ve seen some comments like these published in other blogs.
Maybe the blogosphere has become too crowded that rendered anti-spam filters like Akismet ineffective.