Sometimes the answer is so obvious that you can’t even see it. This morning I made a realization that’s been sinking in over the pasts week: I’m not getting any comment spam. I mean none. For 8 complete days. This made me wonder what was going in Spammer Central… were they planning some new attack? Were they gathering new methods to thwart our countermeasures? I even posted a message to the WordPress hackers mailing list.
This is kind of an OT query, but I figured the hackers list would be most attuned to any changes. I haven’t received a single comment spam in 7 days. It’s not that my comments are broken — I’ve received 92 valid comments in that same period — and with my plugin I can choose to view comment spam whenever so they’re not simply hiding in the database. I just haven’t gotten any. This is down from an average of around 10 to 15 a day. Anyone else notice a significant decrease or other change in modus operandi?
It’s not that I miss it, I’m just very curious whether this is a widespread phenomenon.
I got a couple of responses that were basically to the effect of “consider yourself lucky.” Well, I do honestly, but it got me concerned that perhaps something was diddled somewhere in my install.
Then it hit me: 8 days ago I installed Eric Meyer’s WP-Gatekeeper plugin on the site. You may have noticed it, it’s the thing that presents a new text input in the comment form with some random question that you must answer to be allowed to post. Those of you that didn’t notice and think that I’ve turned off comments on some posts now know the truth. That’s the Gatekeeper’s way of saying “you failed my simple Turing test and are not a human hence you do not get the privilege of posting.”
Now that’s some serious mojo to whack 100% of the 10-15 comment spams I got daily. I’ve actually hacked the Gatekeeper code a bit to keep track of the number of failed validations so I can know what kind of spam traffic I’m still seeing (as well as adding that bit of information to the WordPress Dashboard as well). I tell you, between the WP-Gatekeeper and my own referral spam countermeasures it’s getting to be downright pleasant to run a blog again.
UPDATE: Just FYI, in the time it took to compose this post I received 7 attempted spams. Thank you again, Gatekeeper.
Rob Mientjes Says:March 15th, 2005 at 4:36 pm
Damn, I really hoped Gatekeeper would stop most of it. However, most of my spam consists of Trackback spam, which is most annoying. About 300 a day.
ColdForged Says:March 15th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
Wow Rob. I don’t know what my deal is but I have yet to get any Trackback spam and I’m not doing anything special that I know of. I wonder what the disconnect is.
Though I’m probably tempting fate just by mentioning it
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Rob Mientjes Says:March 15th, 2005 at 4:45 pm
Yes, most probably
I am seeing that I disable Trackback completely, as Pingback seems harder to fake, and more importantly, Technorati’s per-post cosmos doesn’t seem to get spammed. Which is a good thing 
So I will most likely be pondering my comment system for a long long time (I’m working on the dev of my own system, to flex my muscles and to do stuff I can’t with WP).
You are quite lucky anyways, as long as it lasts. For why I get bombarded? Maybe it’s my PageRank of 6. I’m quite easily found.
AdamStac Says:March 16th, 2005 at 12:11 am
Dude I love you’re re-released versions…can you release that to the public? I have to say that I like that little thingy down there and thought it was a cool idea for sure.
I’m still developing and may need to delay the relaunch of the new design, but that’s the life of a busy person like me.
Whew…
ColdForged Says:March 16th, 2005 at 3:27 pm
For whatever reason I don’t feel comfortable about releasing a modified version just for this. I would be amenable to posting a patch for people to modify their own copy, though, so maybe I’ll do that
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AdamStac Says:March 16th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
Well I say thanks for that! I like the way you code. You are very clever and think of things that others don’t. Good ideas and you tweak nearly everything that you touch (from what I can tell). You’re blog is rocking and you’ve definitely made yourself a “known” in the WordPress world…so I say good job on that!!
Be sure to let me know the details, cause I definitely want to incorporate this into my site/redesign when I get it up and running. I have to push back the launch date a few days upwards of a week. I took on a new “quick” project that will consume my weekend so that’s the deal as of now. Just FYI…
I’ll have to engage your archives here in a bit too, to read up on all the security things you have covered so I can be “spam/referrer free”!!