Having had to live with comment spams for the last few months to the tune of more than just a few a week, I finally found an interesting tool called Bad Behavior which seems to have dramatically slowed the tide. It works by identifying the “bots” used by spammers and blocking them, while allowing other “bots” and browsers to come through. This set of scripts is easily attached to any php-based website by simply adding an “include” line at the beginning of the php file. In WordPress, this is even simpler with the tool able to work as a plug-in module.
Installing Bad Behavior was a real breeze for me. Although I am by no means an accomplished php code geek, I could easily follow the instructions included and install it with a complete success the first time. There was only one php script to modify and everything else was just a “click this and click that” affair.
I must say that I have been very, very impressed by Bad Behavior‘s effectiveness, that I do not know how I did without it for so long. The number of comment spams that I get now is down to about a few (usually less than five) in a week. This is a real change from the usual 100 or more that I normally get. Most of them seem to be about some pharmaceutical products of doubtful reputation or some card game from the home state of president Bush. Though I find it quite strange that the ip addresses resolve to Moldova and a few other former-USSR states (well, not really, actually).
If you operate a blog of one kind or another or any other php-based site, I strongly recommend using Bad Behavior to save you a lot of time and bandwidth. Instead of spending half-an-hour each week deleting unwanted comments, you could spend time writing an article just like this one, praising the effectiveness of Bad Behavior.
What is now known as comment spam is actually a big problem in blogosphere. It is continually seeping through the cracks in the comment defences. As long as a blog system software of one kind or another get used by a lot of people, it will be targetted by the spammers. This uniformity is a real problem for a lot of us. Whether you use WordPress or something else it makes no difference. As long as a lot of your peers use the same system, a script can easily insert comments in the articles automatically.
The only way we can make comment spam disappear or at least less prevalent in blogosphere is to make everyone use a unique software. This is definitely not a possibility given that I, like a lot of people, do not want to spend time configuring the blogging software let alone writing my own set of scripts to make up a blogging system. I think the key compromise will be to generate an element of difference between different installs of the same package. Something akin to the random image verification system now used by Yahoo and other sites to separate bots from real people.
As good as Bad Behavior is right now, just like the defences of Zion in the Matrix, it will sooner or later be breached by the bots. The way to defeat the bots is to reduce the uniformity of the different installs of the blogging packages. Just my 2%’s worth.