Comments from several a day to zero

[rj]

Since I had so much security troubles in comments and tied them to registration, comments on my blog went from several a day to none a day. These days with facebook etc no one wants to fk around playing registration and info games. As soon as it gets even a little demanding the move on, as I would do.

So I got the new Serendipity running, the new auto reg plugin... What is the best process for OPEN comments?

When I did it to require name, email and a captcha, I got about 5000 emails A DAY about attempted comment incursion. Which I hear I cant turn off and it sure is a pull on my email prg. Gosh... Of those 5000 attempts a day, one or two would get by. But it is possible because they are so few that they did it by hand.

So whats the best way of doing comments with the least demands on the visitor?
Are there any spam plugin stuff that I may have wrong or something? I am using 1.77.

Btw, moderating is problematic trying to find a real one in email in the 5000 attempts a day.

[Timbalu]

Sounds like a spammers hight traffic site...

To stop trackback spam a little bit, use fail2ban, e.g.
http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2619- ... l#extended
This should be easy to clone somehow for comments and/or auto-registration things.

[onli]

You already tried spamblock_bayes? Quite some blogs use it to have comments without any further protection.

[Timbalu]

Hi Malte
Yes sure, but this does not avoid the traffic of spammers trying to achieve a goal, does it?

[onli]

Hm? It doesn't hinder them to visit the blog, if that is what you want to say. But it prevents them doing comments, which should be their goal.

[Timbalu]

Yes I fully agree, but if you get "5000" spam tries a day, this is a traffic issue on low level servers, even if they don't come through. In this case you need to block spammers after some tries by IP, at least for a while, which could be done via fail2ban.

[Don Chambers]

Are you using an akismet key?

[LazyBadger]

Are there any spam plugin stuff that I may have wrong or something? I am using 1.77.

Configured with care Akismet + SURBL + "moderate after ... days" solved most of my troubles. With "Discard spam" and "Moderate rest" I have small subset of comments to moderate (open comments + Captcha)