I Got Spammed. Hard.

Seriously, this is ridiculous. It was cute at first getting the occasional spammer. I even took some delight in moderating their comments as spam and banishing them to the WordPress netherworld, but it is starting to get a little time consuming. Luckily, thanks to the WordPress comment management system none of you have been subject to this stream of obnoxious ads.

So, I’ve gone ahead and installed the well known and popular Spam Karma 2 to help deal with the problem. Spam Karma 2 is an automated spam filtering tool that performs a very complex sequence of checks on every comment posted. Tweaking with its administration page reveals it to be a very powerful and robust little plugin. I’m looking forward to working with it. As always with a spam filter I’ll start it out on a friendly setting and ratchet it up as need be. Hopefully, I won’t have to push it to a level where we’ll get too many false positives.

I will keep you all posted on how effectively it reduces my moderation workload. Come to think of it, I’m a little inspired by the Connections - Reloaded theme, so I think I’ll include some Spam Karma stats on the blog itself.

I’ve also installed the Bad Behavior plugin which should block spambots from accessing my blog and RSS feed completely, so we’ll see how well that works out.