I suppose it must be a sign of RecommendedbyDavid’s growing popularity, but the level of spam on my blog has got beyond a joke.
Since I started my blog, I’ve taken measures to filter out the spam comments (so hopefully you shouldn’t have seen any spam on my blog) but over the last few months this has become an increasingly trying and time-consuming process. So much so, that I’ve recently had to search out a better method, which I’ve now found; but first a bit of background info.
My blog was created with WordPress and to make it easier for you to leave comments on my blog, I don’t require you to register first. While this makes it easier for you, it also makes it easier for “spambots”, those automated self-centred nasties who plague bona-fide users of blogs, e-mail and the internet generally.
Obviously, I only want legitimate and relevant comments to appear on my blog. Now, while the “back-office” of my blog allows me to set up basic rules regarding which comments are referred to me for “moderation” before they appear live, obviously this is a labour-intensive exercise.
Up until now, I have supplemented my own moderation of comments with the use of Akismet. Akismet is a very effective spam filtering system. Any comments of a dubious nature are prevented from appearing live on your blog and filtered out into the same “holding area” used for comments awaiting moderation. Now, given that spam on your blog is generally pitched at the same intellectual level as spam in your e-mail, then wading through it to find the genuine comments is not a pleasant process.
A few weeks ago, I decided that enough was enough and started to search for an alternative way to control this nuisance.
What I had seen before, and used on many blogs, was the “captcha” approach. That’s the one where you have to prove you’re human by reading those squiggly random letters and typing them into a box. That’s the way forward, I thought.
Now, obviously, for these to work, the captcha software has to be integrated into the blog software. Well, although I have some skills with web-design, I have to admit that I am not very comfortable with playing around with PHP scripts. So having tried, without success, to install a couple of captcha scripts, I abandoned that idea and went looking for an alternative solution.
Eventually, I came across something rather mysteriously called “Bad Behavior”. It claimed to be able to stop spam on WordPress blogs (amongst other software) but without the use of “captchas”. Now, at this point I remembered all those frustrating occassions where I’d misread a captcha and had to re-type it, and realised that I didn’t really want you to have that experience on my blog. So this “Bad Behavior” sounded ideal and, like most WordPress plug-ins, had no cost attached.
Although Bad Behavior is a PHP solution, it doesn’t need any special integration with WordPress. You just download it as a normal “plug-in” and activate it in the usual way - so, very easy installation and no extra customisation is needed for your own site.
The way Bad Behavior works is that it ignores the spam but concentrates on the spammer. It uses its own HTTP fingerprinting approach to analyse HTTP headers, IP address and other metadata from the request trying to access your site, to determine whether it is spam or in any way malicious. If the analysis matches a profile of known malicious behaviour, the request is blocked and never gets to your site.
Having said that, Bad Behavior was designed to block no legitimate use and its documentation states that it “must necessarily let some things pass”. Consequently, it recommends that you use it as a first line of defence in front of, rather than instead of, traditional anti-spam methods. So, for the last 2 weeks, I have been running it alongside Akismet.
THE RESULTS
I am not aware that I am running any additional software (so no slowdown in performance) OTHER THAN IN RESPECT OF THE RESULTS.
As before, genuine comments are appearing live on my blog immediately. Comments recognised as requiring moderation are coming cleanly into the “holding area”. Other (i.e. spam) items in the holding area - NIL. Malicious approaches stopped by Bad Behavior in the last 7 days - 86.
Well done, Bad Behavior - mission accomplished!
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