chuggnutt.com

I've started using the spam-killing service Akismet to handle comment spam on my three blogs. That, and instituted a basic moderation system for comments. I can't say as I've been dealing with as much comment spam as some people, but I just got sick and tired of dealing with the problem myself and decided to offload the work.

So far Akismet is pretty slick, though I'd guesstimate that it has only caught 50% or so of the spam comments I've received since activating it today. I'm hoping it gets better.

It took a little bit of work to integrate it into my custom software, but I was able to crib a PHP class someone else had written and get it all integrated fairly smoothly. If you're running one of the standard platforms like Movable Type or WordPress, though, there already exist handy plugins that you should just be able to drop into your blog directory.

So if there's any comment weirdness over the next few days as I monitor the activity and work out the kinks, bear with me. If you post a legitimate comment, it should show up right away, unless it was incorrectly flagged as spam. That's where the moderation comes in; I'll make sure to approve legit comments ASAP.

I've seen this name show up a few times now in my email spam filter: Natalie Gadzooks. Perhaps it's not the best spam name ever, but every time I see it, it makes me laugh.

Woke up this morning to find 116 notices of trackback spam littering my inbox. Out of the blue, and I notice that a whole bunch of other weblogs got hit today, too. It appears some spammer finally wrote a script to exploit trackback. Ah, well. It was easy enough to fix; do a quick mod to my add_trackback.php file, redirecting bad traffic, and a quick SQL query on the database to clear out the offending spam, less than 10 minutes. Gotta love having absolute control over my system.

So the spam problem finally got to be a little overwhelming on our BendCable email account, and we opted in to use BendCable's anti-spam software/service, Spam Pounder. But here's the catch: you don't actually get this anti-spam service on your regular bendcable.com email, no—instead they change your email to a bendbroadband.com address because that's where they have the actual anti-spam software running. (In order to preserve your bendcable.com address—which you may have had for years, as we have, and don't want it gone—they set up a forward that shunts everything from your bendcable.com address to the bendbroadband.com one.)

I mean, what the hell is that? Sure changing your email address is a solution for spam, but that's not the point. I don't have a lot of confidence in an ISP that can't even set up spam filtering software on their main mail server, fer chrissakes.

And what the hell is with that name ("Spam Pounder") and logo?? The images I'm associating with it are not good ones...

Now, having said all that, I will concede that so far it's doing the job: almost all of the spam is now being caught, I'd give it a 98-99% effectiveness rating so far. The technology seems to work.

But why can't BendCable integrate this into their main email server like everyone else?