Weblog of Wesley Fryer

I have no idea why, but in the last 2 days my blog has been besieged by a ton of comment spams that I suspect are from a robot program– the name of each comment spam message poster has been “Hi There.” I have been looking at a bunch of Captcha plug-ins for WordPress, as well as other spam-fighting plug-ins. After trying several, I’ve settled on adding Math Comment Spam Protection. This joins Akismet and Spam Karma 2 as my blog spam fighting tools. I’ve debated whether or not to post this information, since someone could theoretically be targeting my blog specifically and use this information to get spam comments through– but I kind of doubt my blog is a specific target– I think this “attention” is an automatic result of higher Google page ranks for some of my posts. That’s all speculation on my part, however.

I’ve wanted to avoid “captcha” requirements on my blog, since the words can sometimes be hard to read and be a pain for people– but it seems some sort of turing test (like the basic math problem provided by the “Math Comment Spam Protection” plug-in) is needed to stop this automated comment spam madness. I am glad I’ve been monitoring comments the last couple of days– if I was disconnected from the technology and on vacation (yes I know I’m in Hawaii, but I really have been working) it is a bit scary to think what could have happened. Like outsourcing, in cases like this I see the benefit of using a commercial blogging tool like Blogger (even if it is provided for free, it seems “commercial” compared to WordPress.) The captcha features that can be enabled on Blogger haven’t seemed too cumbersome, and they do seem effective at preventing the comment spam.

I sure wish the people who are generating the computer programs that create all this comment spam and these headaches would find a more constructive way to spend their time. If you have feedback on this new “math problem” commenting requirement, please let me know. I want commenting to be as open and easy as possible on my website, but I also don’t want any type of commenting spam to get through. I am guessing that as some of my blog posts have been assigned higher page ranks by Google, the attention the pages draw from blog comment spammers has increased.

P.S. – It appears the problem I’m having is with “TB” – trackback spam. I followed these instructions on the WordPress forum and executed a MySQL query using PHPMyAdmin for the first time tonight– turning off all pingbacks for all the posts on my blog. So now we’ll see if this makes a difference.

On this day..

• Using Minecraft for Virtual Simulations & Oklahoma Ag in the Classroom - 2011
• Improving Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking Skills with Media - 2011
• Why Veteran's Day is November 11th - 2011
• Video Tributes to Oklahoma and Kansas Military Veterans - 2010
• Digital Citizenship in Libraries: Constructively Leveraging the Power of the Social Web - 2009
• A reminder from Linus about how important personal recognition can be - 2009
• WikiPedia to go (an offline download for schools) - 2008
• Making the case for a safe, moderated learning community for Oklahoma schools - 2008
• Pleased with Plaxo - 2007
• Astronaut courage and NASA ingenuity shown again - 2007