I’ve been experimenting with different configurations for spam protection lately and want to share results which may be interesting to other bloggers.
Unprotected
Leaving blog without any protection is worse than turning off firewall on your computer. Don’t do it – you’ll get hammered with spam. It doesn’t matter what blog engine you use and how popular your blog is. People make living by “harvesting” unprotected blogs and selling lists to third parties, sooner or later you’ll end up on that list – and it likely will be sold more than once…
Recaptcha
Recaptcha will stop about 80% of all spam, which is interesting. I find it hard to believe that so many people do manual spam comments, it is more likely that some bots are more sophisticated than others and found a way to break through Recaptcha while others don’t. But anyway, filtering out 80% of garbage is a good thing, turn it on.
Akismet
Personally I don’t like to force commenters jump through recaptcha hoop, so I turned it off. Yes, that means a whole lot more spam to deal with, but that’s ok if you don’t have to do it manually. And as spammers… sorry, SEO experts, getting more aggressive, thankfully watch dogs like Akismet getting better too. Just take a look at my stats below:
The way it works, comment gets passed through the chain of enabled anti-spam services and if any of them thinks it is spam, it goes to the spam folder and dog that barked gets spam counter incremented as a reward.
So, according to my stats Akismet blocked 124 spam comments, which is very good. Only 18 spams passed further and got killed by StopForumSpam (5) and TypePad (13). And what really awesome – not a singe spam got into inbox. Wow! I guess, it really pays off to turn on all 3 services currently available in BlogEngine.
It is really fascinating cat-and-mouse game to watch. What puzzles me is why Google sucks so much when it gets to fighting spammers. I would think they figure it out long ago and create their own hit list, so spammer rating would go down instead of up. I guess, there is some interest involved.
Update - 3 month later:
