The Apocalypse blog got 2104 spam comments today!

Fortunately, Akismet caught most of them. 14 were sitting waiting for moderation. By the time I marked them all as spam, I’d received 4 more.

If you don’t know about Akismet, it’s a built-in Wordpress plugin that detects and filters spam. It works by comparing comments with spam comments collected by other blogs. The spam is separated from the “good” comments and is automatically deleted after 15 days.

Here’s what I don’t understand, though. I have Wordpress configured so that users have to be logged in in order to comment. I have very few users on the blog an I know who they all are. None of them made these 2104 comments. So where the hell did they come from?

I get that people are using software that directly posts the comments into Wordpress, but why oh why isn’t Wordpress enforcing the requirement that they be from a valid, logged-in user? This calls for either reading the code or doing some Googling, neither of which I really feel like doing right now.

There is a recently released plugin that turns off comments on articles over a certain age. I really dislike this idea because I hate cutting people off from commenting on old material; new users may easily have found something old by searching, and even if no one else would notice I dislike the idea of not letting them comment. However, this looks like an easy way to cut back on the flood of spam, so I’m going to try it.

This plugin is Comment Timeout.

Oops! The Apocalypse Blog received 10 more spam comments while I was writing this…

[tags]wordpress, comments, spam, comment spam, akismet[/tags]

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