Fighting spam with mollom
As many of you may have noticed I decided to roll my own blog engine in merb and I have to say the most annoying thing so far … is SPAM. My comments have just been inundated with the most absurd comments ever.
So, I apologize that the site has just been a spam hole for a week or so, but I finally implemented some spam protection via Mollom (which is a similar service to Akismet).
I’m not entirely sure how well Mollom is going to work yet, but a couple of the test comments that I’ve made have been blocked so that’s a good start. I’ll be adding in some more data so that Mollom can make some better decisions over the next couple days in hopes to eliminate as much spam as possible.
Anyways … just wanted to drop a quick apology for all the viagra and penis enlargement ads that have been flooding the site.
I think it’s too aggressive. Testing it in development, my comments often got detected as spam, despite the fact they were quite unspammy (in some cases, even blank [?]). I had to comment the lines that insta-banned posts that were identified as spam, because I ended up banning myself. If my comments got identified as spam then I imagine some of the crappy posts other users make will be.
Mollom’s website says that anything identified as spam is almost always spam, but…
I considered using Akismet but I like how Mollom provides captcha for content it’s not sure about. That’s pretty awesome in theory.