A little over a week ago I wrote that I had passed over the 100k mark on spam caught by Akismet. Shortly thereafter, Sarah of Stuff by Sarah pinged that post with a post of her own about some of the tactics that she uses to fight spam.
I made 3 major changes to the way this site worked.
- Change the Comment script filename
- Change one of the required form field’s ID/name
- Remove the ability for trackbacks
All 3 made a difference however now I only have the first method in place.
Following her lead, I implemented the first method. It’s rather simple really, although I do think that it’ll be broken for a while the first few times I update wordpress. I’m sure I’ll forget it for a day or two.
It’s been very nearly 8 days since I made the change and I’ve had just under 800 spams caught by Akismet. That’s an average of just under 100 per day. Holy Cow! That’s awesome. Some of you may not think so, but the truth of it is that I was getting somewhere around 300-400 spams a day. Wouldn’t you like to eliminate 75% of your spam?
In any case, the instructions are fairly simple. I’ll let Sarah tell you as it was her idea in the first place. Head over to her post, Zero Comment Spam, where she explains it all in detail.
About Shane Ede
Glad to hear it’s made a difference. I found once I made the first changes the main spam was trackback spam which was why I installed the trackback plugin however despite now removing it I still don’t get trackbacks so I think they’re gone for ever!
Still, 75% reduction is a good amount 😀
Make sure that when you update your blog theme, you also update the call (comments.php I think) to the newly named comment script. Ahem 😉