Spam

Comment Spam.

Got a comment spam on one of my pages today – fortunately they only spammed one comment, with a “I like your website” followed by loads of links to loads of different web sites. I just promptly deleted it. Then tonight when I checked my rss feeds, one guy had been hit about 15 times with the same comment, but from “different people” – the script obviously uses different names such as lisa, phil etc.
(sounds like the author might be an eastender fan)

Comment Spammers plugin.

I’ve installed James Seng’s Bayesian filter for MT on this blog and laboriously went through all my comments and marked them as not spam. (A button to mark ALL comments as spam or not spam would be nice for first installations. Most people have probably already cleaned out their comments from spammers when they install something like this). Now it reckons that all my comments are 50% likely to be spammers and 50% unlikely to be spam. Will be interesting to see if this changes over time!

SpamDrop

I downloaded and installed SurfSecret’s Spamdrop the other day on the office pc, and so far out of the 217 messages received today, not one of them has been detected as spam. The interface is VERY similar to the cloudmark SpamNet software but a bit clunkier. It does provide whitelisting and blacklisting though which is good however in order to get to this functionality and to see the spam stats you need to go to Tools/Options/Spamdrop/Advanced/ – a one click button on the toolbar that gets installed would be a lot friendlier. The other thing is that their faq page says it works via a web proxy, but when I checked our firewall logs traffic on port 8600 was being blocked.