It's now over three years since I first started using the services of Mollom to keep spam off the comments and e-mails from this site.
I posted about it at the time, but at that moment Mollom was yet to block a single item of real spam on the site. As I said, the jury was still out as to how effective it is.
Well, come back three years later. Here's a graph showing what's gone on. Green is genuine mail / comments. Brown is spam comments / mail. A few of those mails have been spam that I've had to delete manually, but it's probably single figures, so it's let very little real spam through. Equally, I'm only aware of one real, humanly-originated, message that got blocked. So it's doing to a good job at not blocking "ham", and at not letting through "spam".
What I find shocking is the way the number of spam attempts have exploded over recent months. Zoom the graph in to just show the past 6 months and you can see that 20 spam comments / e-mails a day is the minimum. Most days are over 40, and it's not uncommon to exceed 60. Most of these are comments on blog posts, so I'm glad not to have to delete all of those by hand each day.
If you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog, I highly recommend you install the relevant plugin and sign up for a free account over at Mollom. Mollom's better known amongst the Drupal community, but for completeness here is the link to the relevant module.
Comments
want to express my complete
want to express my complete satisfaction with my glasses and the professionalism with which my order was filled. The frames are the best I have ever had and the lenses are perfect. Part of the reason for my satisfaction is the ability to go on-line and try on the frames. I was able to compare and study the choices. I will highly recommend your service to others.
{snip - link removed by James at 14:13, Sunday 18th December 2011}
Irony alert: Exploring how spammers work.
The comment above is one I would normally delete straight away. Initially it ended with a URL to a site selling fake Oakley sunglasses. I've removed the URL.
But I've left the comment. I want my readers to enjoy the irony of which post this spammy comment ended up on!
A little look at what happened will shed some light as to why spam is so hard to catch.
Normally, comments like that are left by "bots" - computer programs that automatically post comments on blogs or in forums. This was a real human being. They run Windows XP and IE8, and they are (with 99% certainty) in Fujian province in China. Their IP address begins 110.86.*.*. They are probably being paid a very low wage to spam blogs and forums.
Initially they left the same comment as the one above, only it ended in several links to the same URL. The text for those links was phrases like "fake oakley sunglasses". Mollom immediately caught that as spam - the comment was rejected and they weren't even given the chance to prove their "humanity" with a CAPTCHA.
At that point, a true bot would have given up, or more likely assumed the comment had posted successfully and moved onto the next target. Not this individual. By paying individuals to do this the spammers can get through all kinds of CAPTCHA tests and can persevere through such set-backs. So they posted again. This time there was only one link at the end of the post - just to the URL, with no other text in the link. That one got through.
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