Wow! I don’t know what to do with myself. Normally when I get up in the morning, I have to check all the spam Akismet caught to see if there were any false positives. However, thanks to the implementation of yesterday’s spam countermeasures, there was just one new spam to delete! Shortly after making last night’s post, I added two more countermeasures to really can the spam.
Kill Tor Anonymous Proxies
Many spammers send out their spam through tor proxies to hide their tracks. By denying access from these proxies, you prevent spammers from being able to comment spam your blog. It also means normal people using a tor proxy are blocked out as well, so you’ll have to weigh the pro and con of doing this.
Proxy.org maintains a blacklist of known tor proxies used by spammers. Copy the list to your .htaccess file and you’ll deny a ton of comment spammers from accessing your site. Credit goes to Shoemoney for this tip.
Shut Down Comments To Old Posts
The first comment spam I ever got was done to an old post that had gone to page two. Comment spammers like to target older posts because the search engines have indexed them and you may not see it since the posts are no longer on the front page. The way to prevent this is to shut down comments after a set number of days. You can do this manually but the easier method would be to use a Plugin.
Comment Timeout is a Plugin that will automatically disables comments on older blog entries after a certain period. It also gives you an option to keep comments open for longer periods when there is an ongoing discussion. The Plugin is extremely easy to install and use. Right now, I have the Plugin set to disable comments on all posts older than 20 days but you can set whatever value you feel is appropriate.
The combination of all these new spam countermeasures has reduced the number of comment spam I get each day to single digits. I can now concentrate on producing content instead of checking through the hundreds of comment spam that I normally get.
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