Experiment with SPAM comments

After getting a lot of comment SPAM on different sites I thought I’ll run a quick experiment. Launch a honeypot, almost disable spam prevention and check out the statistics. More details on the honeypot page.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 5:33 am by Toomas Römer and is filed under creative. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.changelogic.com Imre

    I’m wondering if (thanks to the spam) the copied articles would become higher ranked than the original ones on dow.ngra.de, like oldnewthing once complained about his content – see http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/02/18/7761978.aspx

  • http://bassistance.de Jörn Zaefferer

    Disabling track-backs and activating Akismet worked quite well for me. I still moderate everything, but I don’t really have to delete any spam anymore.

    Still, I’ll be interested in your findings, I assume you will post them here, right?

    PS: That captcha sucks :(

  • Toomas Römer

    @Imre it was a great read but kind of sad for authors of original content. Cool scripting challenge to automate this kind of scraping though :)

    @Jõrn – Akismet worked really well until one day I had to moderate too many comments by hand. If you’re one of the first to get a new kind of spam that Akismet does not know about you’re out of luck.

    I’ll post the results to this blog. So I’ll have the first follow up in a month.

    About the captcha. It does not look pretty, but it works :)