Serendipity Forums

hi everybody,

how do you handle with spam in your blog? How do you protect your blog?
Each night i have arround 50 - 100 spam entrys.

Could you give me a few tips like me something can reduce that ?

The following is already installed:
- serendipity_event_spamblock
- serendipity_event_spamblock_bayes
- serendipity_event_recaptcha

Mokkujin wrote:Could you give me a few tips like me something can reduce that ?

You can't actually reduce spam, just try to handle it in a way that it produces as little hassle for you as possible while still making it as easy as possible for honest people to still comment.

Here's what I do (listed in the order the plugins are installed in):

1. Spamblock Bee: uses a pretty simple technique that still works surprisingly well – a visually hidden form field that should not be filled out that spam bots still see and try to fill out. That's called a Honey Pot, and it does all the heavy lifting in my block in terms of comment spam (simply does not accept comments that fill out the hidden field). I do not use the hidden captcha that the plugin also offers (having to solve a simple math equation, but also hidden) since that used to cause issues in Firefox.
2. Spamblock (Standard): I don't use many options, but those are still pretty useful. It would take up too much space here to list them all, but let's say that required fields make it pretty easy to reject some bot spam – just don't overdo it to not annoy real commentators. (I use name, email, comment.) Forced moderation after 14 days these days mostly seems to catch my own trackbacks, but every now and then, it catches a spam comment as well.
3. Spamblock Bayes: this is a learning, phrase-based filter. It basically dissects the comments that you can qualify as ham or spam and learns from this process. That is very convenient since it works well on its own after a while, but I have come to find that it works best as the “last line of defense” focussing on the (very few) comments that pass the other two. My Bayes settings are pretty standard.

I do not use recaptcha or any kind of visual captcha since those are mostly inaccessible and even a hassle for users without any disabilities.

Try searching the forums for this, there are more and other posts on how people deal with spam. Also, since I know you're German, there's an episode of the (German) s9y InfoCamp podcast on this topic.

YL

i read your post installed spam bee and place my plugins in the order you said and now i have no spam .... is the order important ?!? perhaps this was my fail at my first config, i think i will uninstall reCaptcha too doesnt work with Edge ...

yellowled wrote:I do not use recaptcha or any kind of visual captcha since those are mostly inaccessible and even a hassle for users without any disabilities.

Recaptcha works very well to block spam, so I use it for older entries, as I get most comments in the first few days after posting, and nearly no comments to entries older than a month.

Mokkujin wrote:i read your post installed spam bee and place my plugins in the order you said and now i have no spam .... is the order important ?!?

Yes, of course. Plugins are executed in the order the plugins are placed. So if you go with my order, any incoming spam will have to pass Bee first, then Standard, and finally Bayes. Most of the spam (from my experience) fails at Bee already, but of course that depends on the settings you chose for every plugin. It is very unlikely that they will work ideally for you without adapting their configuration!

Also, you should make sure to use logging (all spam plugins can write text log files) and actually check the log files for “false positives” (i.e. valid comments marked as spam) on a regular basis until you're positive that your setup actually works properly.

YL

aimeusdietger wrote:Wordpress has several plugins for spam such as Anti-Spam Bee, WangGuard, Wordpress Zero Spam, WpBruiser (which is a no-captcha anti-spam), and much more.

And those plugins work for Serendipity, too?

thh wrote:And those plugins work for Serendipity, too?

oh my I think I just hurt myself laughing

I've found that the most effective anti-spam plug-in is spam:/challenge response. I ask a question whose answer is obvious to a human but not a spam bot, such as "Can elephants fly?" Since doing this I've only had one spam get through in about a year; before that I was getting flooded from time to time.

Finally ReCaptcha v2 is supported! See: http://spartacus.s9y.org/index.php?mode ... _recaptcha

V1 was deprecated on 31st March and plugin was released on 30th. Nice.

HQJaTu wrote:Finally ReCaptcha v2 is supported!

ReCaptcha v2 has been supported since 12/2016.

We just dropped v1 support now and forcibly switched v1 installations to v2.

HQJaTu wrote:V1 was deprecated on 31st March and plugin was released on 30th. Nice.

Antispam bee works great and is privacy-friendly