Included with WP 2.0 install is a plugin called "Aksimet" which is basically useless as it doesn't stop spammerbots from spamming, it just catches the spam before it ends up on your site--the catch is, you still have to check it to make sure it's legit because it does make mistakes. Another catch is that the associated traffic still jams your bandwidth to the moon.
Oh and Aksimet only displays the first 15 (or so) suspected spam comments--even if it has more in its qeue (sp??), they're not listed on the first page and there doesn't appear to be a "next page" button/link anywhere.
The reason Akismet is so useless for dealing with comment spammerbots in the real world is because it doesn't stop them from posting at all. My traffic was literally through the roof (I now owe $140 in bandwidth overages because I got twice my maximum traffic for January!). Akismet does NOTHING to deter comment spam traffic and neither does WP 2.0 itself.
Unless you want to pay out your ass for bandwidth overages, I suggest you start looking for a way to stop comment spammers from even accessing your comments form. The way I've done it is by using a plugin called [http://neuromancer.dif.um.es/blog/index.php?s=wp-morph&submit=Search|WP-Morph] (scroll down for English). It has worked amazingly well. Because I'm not a PHP-head I can't tell you exactly what it does because it works behind the scenes. It doesn't require anything from the user but instead works behind the scenes. It's managed to cut my bandwidth usage dramatically, which is obviously great. It's February 11 and my traffic is still down around 3GB. This is where it should be for a site that is mostly text, does no advertising but still manages 1000-2000 unique visitors per day.
Another thing I noticed was that friggin' search engines were spidering my site so much that they ended up being literally half of my traffic. While some search engine traffic is a useful thing, 50% of your traffic from spiders is too much. So, I installed a robots.txt file in my root. Find out more about robots.txt files at Robotstxt.Org. The short version is that search engine spiders will not spider your site if they see a robots.txt in your root with the below code in it:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Check out Robotstxt.Org to learn how to block certain search engines from spidering your site. This way you can still allow the big guys (like Google and human-rights-haters Yahoo) to spider you.
OK, so that's all I've got to say for now. If you install WP2.0 without adding the WP-Morph plugin and the robots.txt in your root, you may not have any problems with traffic, but I wouldn't want to risk it if I were you. $140 will buy a lot of iPod accessories...
Couple of things:
ReplyDelete- Akismet is not meant to block spam before it can be posted. In fact, its entire workings are based on the spam being posted and identified as such, so that it can be most accurate. Catching spam even before posting can be done pretty much only with blacklists and is wildly inaccurate. The other option is requirements on the client side which get in the way of actual people with legitimate posts.
- Akismet displays more than 15 spams for me
- What kind of hosting plan do you have if you're getting a $140 bandwidth overage bill? Sounds like you need to get better hosting with better prices ;)
- Robos.txt files are especially nice for throttling. Some spiders (notably MSN which really needs it) support attributes in that file that tell it how often it's allowed to crawl. MSN was hitting some of my professionally hosted sites (meaning customers that I host on my servers) pretty hard, using up all of the server's CPU and memory. Adding a throttling directive cooled it down somewhat.
Ah, well.
ReplyDelete"WP-Morph and other anti-spammer plugins deal with the ‘bots directly and avoid incovneniencing the website user entirely."
Except I was prevented from posting the first time I tried. I had to copypaste my story into a newly loaded browser window and try again. Or do you consider me a spammer? Because then yes, it worked wonders.
"How many spams does it display per page?"
All in one page. Does that need further explanation? There is no second page because it would have been empty.
"find some random guy on the ‘net whom you think you can 'help'"
Whoah there, just adding to your story, not trying to prove you wrong or anything. Throttling, by the way, means simply telling it to slow down. MSNbot was hitting one of my websites at about 10-15 requests per second, along with google and whoeverelse was there. On highly dynamic sites, that's a problem. I told it to slow down with the robots.txt. Entirely blocking it was an option of course, but then I'd be gone from search results in no time flat.
"Typical white guy"
What the hell?
"Sorry if I came off excessively rude, but hey–it’s the friggin’ ‘net–deal with it."
Hah, right back at ya, man. And don't worry, I can deal ;) Though like I said, I didn't mean to come off as being rude and I apologise if I did.
But hey. I wasn't trying to prove you wrong on your solution to this problem-- if it works for you then it's a solution, obviously. However, you state that 'WORDPRESS HAS A MAJOR FLAW', which is simply not true. First, Akismet is simply a plugin for wordpress so if anything, Akismet would have the flaw. But I don't think it does. Because by working this way, it has a better chance (in my opinion) at catching spams than anything based locally on a server because of the huge number or people marking comments that it didn't catch as spam. Client-side verification with Javascript is crap because it pretty much disables some people from commenting because their browser happens to not like it (hell, happened to me even though my browser does do javascript!) And I think we both agree that telling the visitor to do stuff (like captchas) is total crap.
Oh, I just had the same problem again, twice. Probably because it took me too long to type:
"This weblog is protected by WP-Morph. This is to prevent comment spam. You have to have JavaScript enhabled in order to post comments here. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Hey, and I just got the error again and all I had to do to avoid it was refresh this page and hit submit again. Zowie. What an inconvenience compared to spending an extra $140 for bandwidth! What was I thinking! Clearly providing this site for free and making it SUPER easy to make comments is WAY more important than being able to keep the site affordable for me to keep going.
ReplyDeleteOK, I talked to the guy who created WP-Morph and he explained that there is a 15 minute limit on users to post comments after the page loads. If you run out of time, just hit reload. No big deal.
ReplyDeleteAs for Akismet being messed up, I have photographic proof:
Click that to make it bigger.
It says 5 comments have been caught as spam but it is only displaying 1 comment with no way of clicking to the next page or anything. NICE!
I think my point has been made.