LebGeeks

mir

Member

Wordpress - Askimet trouble

Hello guys,

I have a self hosted blog, along with askimet anti spam
I am receiving lot of spam lately.. and that is more than 200 spam comment on a post
I am just wondering, is there something terribly wrong with askimt nowadays ?
are you facing any problems with askimet + wordpress

what other wordpress anti spam would u recommend
any settings, trick or list of blocked urls u would share ?

Thanks in advance
Regards

rolf

Member

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

is there no captcha??
if yes, can you enable captcha even for registered users?

samer

Admin

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

Rolf, with Askimet you don't really need CAPTCHA.
Mir, do you have the latest versions installed (Wordpress + Askimet)? Did you make any changes to your code recently? Any new plugins?

Edit: It seems there's nothing wrong with Askimet.. their homepage says they caught 10,882,857 just today..

rolf

Member

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

Rolf, with Askimet you don't really need CAPTCHA.
Mir, do you have the latest versions installed (Wordpress + Askimet)? Did you make any changes to your code recently? Any new plugins?

Edit: It seems there's nothing wrong with Askimet.. their homepage says they caught 10,882,857 just today..

I would say when you get 200 spam posts, then maybe CAPTCHA could help...
whats the problem with CAPTCHAS, you dont get false positives, you have zero spam (for  now...)

In the future, if the OCR bots get really good, a combination of something CAPTCHA-like and askimet might be necessary.

In fact, as spam bots get really, really smart, you will have to build bots to fight them...

But then, it is hard for a bot to tell the difference between a bot and human, because it is a bot himself...

So it will get to the point where humans must be hired to do spam filtering (of course with the help of bots)

Eventually, as technology progresses, even humans will not be able to tell a bot from a human.

Then we will just have to admit the fact that bots have become equal to humans and live with it.

...

The implementation of IPV6 will give spammers huge pools of IP addresses to spam from, and will therefore make spamming much more hard to track. A possible way to delay the above scenario is put some control over IP allocation, so that spammers wont be able to buy thousands of IPs... Right now you can get IPV6 IPs for free!
That may have to change.

Last edited by rolf (January 14 2009)

mir

Member

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

well i manually added some entries to the block list.. let me see if it will work
otherwise i will set up another anti-spam that was recommended by 7arami

I hate having to force user to login in order to reply, it kinda violates ppl right to privacy/anonymousity and it is a hassle.
as for captcha... it is ok, but it is not nice, but if i have to do it.. i would

and yeah, bots are getting smart, but there are some captcha so far unbreakable like google's
i think another option is to ask the user logical question and wait for the correct answer.. like what color is the sky, if spammers managed to crack that, then i will let them spam me as much as they want, cuz they are helping around with AI 

I guess u are right about the IPv6 thing :S
and regarding the bot/human equality thing... weird thing, i made it into a joke a real long time ago, check this link : http://www.lifegeeked.com/archives/469

I am glad it is just me tho

maybe the best way to fight spammers is by being mean to them -- if u know what i mean

Last edited by mir (January 14 2009)

battikh

Member

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

if you want to give captcha a shot, try recaptcha... here are the links:
the wordpress plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/
and to register for a recaptcha account: http://recaptcha.net/
(after registering for a recaptcha account, you'll get a key that you have to copy paste to your wordpress plugin settings)

on the forum (wont advertise here) we used to suffer from spambots who used to register even with the standard vbulletin captcha thing, since we use recaptcha (i think around a year now), we have been spambot free, so it seems to be doing its job...

mir

Member

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

oh, on onelebanon u used recaptcha ? then it must be a very good plugin

so far i managed to delete the spam comments.. they were like 600 by the end of the day
now if i get more spam.. i swear i am going to find that spammer and kill him and then deface his website and put his pic houweh w ma2toul on it w make it a tihdid la kil l spammers of the world

rolf

Member

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

recapcha is almost unreadable... (almost)
maybe the next thing will be photos like how many puppies do you see in the photo or are they horses... that sort of thing...
Yet since spammers can build a database of images, it will have to be something like either a link with a site that has millions of different images, or 3d images generated on the fly. I think 3d images are the future of captchas.

Last edited by rolf (January 15 2009)

battikh

Member

Re: Wordpress - Askimet trouble

maybe the next thing will be photos like how many puppies do you see in the photo or are they horses... that sort of thing...

rapidshare was using this for some time, you had a set of letters with cats or dogs over each letter and you had to put the letters on which there was a cat, but it was horrible, those dogs used to look so much like cats :@