I use a relatively unsophisticated but highly effective filter for blog comment spam. The system consists of several hundred keywords (mostly spam-related domain names which would never appear in a genuine comment), and a Turing test. The Turing test is a box at the bottom of the comment form, that says: “Do not put anything in this box if you are a human.” <\/p>\n
The Turing test catches between 10-25 spam comments per day; the keyword filter about the same. <\/p>\n
Every week or two, however, a human comes along, and fails<\/em> the Turing test and fills in the “don’t fill in this box” box. I’m not quite sure what to do about that. Maybe the human thinks they are not actually human? <\/p>\n More likely they just don’t read the text next to the box, although it is fairly prominent. <\/p>\n Unfortunately, this seems to be a general phenomenon on the web. Many people have a tendency not to read text on webpages. For example, I’ve gotten a lot of questions along the lines of “How do I access my address book in SquirrelMail?” The answer, of course, is to click on “Addresses.” Similary questions arise with respect to my photo album software salonify<\/a> — “how do I view a slide show of images?” (A: Click on “Slide Show.”) <\/p>\n My hope is that the next generation is better able to process web content, but I’m not sure that hope is well founded. <\/p>\n Getting back to the blog comment spam issue, it’s interesting to observe what sorts of topics appear most frequently in comment spams. Over the past several months, pornographic links referencing transsexuals seem to outnumber other topics. I wonder: do the spammers have a scientific method to their marketing? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I use a relatively unsophisticated but highly effective filter for blog comment spam. The system consists of several hundred keywords (mostly spam-related domain names which would never appear in a genuine comment), and a Turing test. The Turing test is a box at the bottom of the comment form, that says: “Do not put anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}