I found the most hilarious spam comment on one of my blogs this morning. Check it out:

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!

The just cracked me up What’s been your best spam comment of the year?

I humbly ask you to make the choice that will allow me to serve my country a little while longer by casting your vote to elect me as your next President of the United States.

I simply can’t believe that the people running his campaign have decided to spray his whining message everyone on the Internet in the hope that they might hit some US citizens who may be persuaded by his message. I’ve seen a number of tweets from people in Australia and France who have received this and noone seems to have signed up for any campaign messages from him.

The issue here is around cost. Unfortunately this is one problem with email, and the reason why spammers are so attracted to the medium. It’s actually cheaper to harass everyone you know that it is to filter out relevant recipients for your email. Granted, your conversion ratio will be abysmal; but if there’s no incremental cost of sending out the extra email, then why bother filtering it in the first place. Why would someone selling nfl jerseys mailshot me, for example, even need to check I’m a likely client (I hate sports!), if it bears no incremental cost to tell me about their products? I wonder if the solution to spam is really around charging people to send email.

Personally, I didn’t really have any issues with either Obama or McCain; but I now hope McCain doesn’t get elected .. I can’t bear the thought of filtering through all the additional spam I’d start receiving from the US.

Enter Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior (shouldn’t that be Behaviour) is an anti-spam plugin that looks at the requests your website gets and block spam bots from even seeing your site. It’s actually pretty clever and quite comprehensive. For example, if a request hits your website that claims it’s GoogleBot (Google’s way of indexing your website), the plugin checks the IP that the request is coming from, and if it’s not coming from Google, it blocks it. And so on and so forth, it checks every request to make sure it’s legitimate. Once I installed it, spam dropped to a couple a day and it’s been holding there ever since.

So, my final word on spam on WordPress: A combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior is the best solution I’ve used so far!

I’ve noticed that the number of spam comments Akismet has cleaned up has decreased substantially since I install Bad Behaviour. This is a plugin that helps ensure that traffic is legitimate and stops bots from even getting as far as your comment page. It’s pretty awesome; much recommended.

One new trend is human-driven spam where someone leaves a comment that vaguely fits in with the subject of the post, and signs there comment with something other than their name, for example: discount hotels Las Vegas. This is fishing for a free contextual link off my comments (as I intentionally DoFollow my comments). I reserve the right to change the commentor’s name in this instance and to delete their link; though I may leave the comment standing if it is someway relevant to the post.

Think this will help reduce my spam?

• Easy to manipulate: WordPress has an extensible API that has allows 3rd party developers to write plugins for it. There’s a wealth of plugins out there doing everything you can imagine. And if you can code in PHP you can write your own plugins for it too. I needed a plugin that sends an email to a commentor on my blog when I reply to their comment, so I just wrote one.
• Spam: For me, spam has become a thing of the past. WordPress comes with a magnificent plugin called Askimet which catches 99.9% of the spam that hits my website. If that’s not good enough for you, you can also implement another plugin called Bad Behaviour which makes it practically impossible for automated spam to get through. That’s unless you want to implement any captcha or another other anti-spam plugins that exists out there.
• Customising layouts: There’s a wealth of themes for WordPress out there and I mean literally thousands of them. Creating your own is also very easy if you know a bit of CSS/HTML. It’s always much easier though to find one similar to what you want and customise it.

Anyone out there think highly of WordPress?

One great thing about WordPress is that it ships with a brilliant plugin called Askimet that has protected me from all this spam in the last few months. My attitude to comment spam has totally changed now. Before it was something annoying, driving me to despair! Now it’s just something I’m curious about .. oh look .. there goes another spam comment. Askimet is just brilliant. I wish I had something similar for my email!

The article points out that the site owners claim this is mainly down to the human element, that they have encouraged and trained their citizens to report spam as soon as it happens and deal with it swiftly and effectively. I’m a bit more cyncal than that and believe it’s down to the policy and technology.

• WordPress.com have a strict policy that restricts their bloggers from monetising their blog. This cause shocks in the PayPerPost community some time back, where PayPerPost blogs were kicked out for contravening WordPress’ TOS. It’s a harsh rule, but it eventually boils down to a lack of incentive for people to set up splogs on WordPress.com. If there’s no financial incentive in doing this, nobody will bother.
• One word: Askimet. Askimet impresses me every single day. It blocks around 500 spam messages a day across my blogs (and increasing daily) without batting an eyelid. Askimet was one of the main reasons I switched to WordPress and WordPress.com uses it as an integral part of their service, keeping their blog clean from spam.

If you want more details, head down to Jonathan’s post

So, here’s what I’ve done. The blog now run these plugins to make things more interesting:

• Gravatars2 is a plugin that adds Gravatars (Globally Recognised Avatars) to each comment. You can either get your own from the Gravatar website, but if you don’t have one, it automatically assigns you one from pool of around 100 images. So, you may end up being Homer Simpson today, or even an anime character!
• Brian’s Latest Comments is producing the “Latest Comments” list that is at the top of my SideBar. This points people at the recent conversations happening on the blog and increases their net worth
• DoFollow is a plugin that removes the evil NoFollow from WordPress‘ comments. Sometime back, this tag had been introduced by search engines to try and minimise comment spam but the truth is .. well it hasn’t. This plugin makes sure that people who comment get a link back to their site, both for people to click on and follow, and also for search engines to index. I would recommend this to anyone who encourages commenting on their blog.

Of course, there’s no way I could do all this without some proper spam filtering, and Askimet is still up there as one of my must-have plugins that everyone should turn on. I’ve added a little image on the sidebar that shows exactly how many spam comments it has caught so far. Impressive huh?

There are now a few products on the market that combat image spam? and traditional spam filters are starting to catch up. For example, Borderware’s MXtreme includes an image analysis component that does more than just OCR and fingerprinting to figure out whether an email consists of a spam message or not. If you’re really interested in spam (well, you know what I mean), there’s a great article on Wikipedia which goes into detail about how spammers operate and outlines the rise of spam in today’s online world.

The interesting thing about this is how there’s a continual battle between spammers and anti-spam companies, quite similar to the battle between virus writers and virus scanners. Both parties continually leapfrog each other pushing technology and innovation foward in the pursuit of triumph over the other party. It’s interesting watching sectors develop and watching out for the real ace in this game: human ingenuity!