Phonelosers.org uses Word Press for just about all of the pages now. Spammers appear to love Word Press. I get a billion percent more spam attempts now than I did before I used Word Press. Luckily, there are a lot of spam filter plugins for Wordpress. I'm using the one that comes built in, called Akismet. Since I've installed it, Akismet has caught 153,215 attempted spam messages for me.
Occasionally a spam message slips through and I have to delete it myself. This usually amounts to 1 or 2 per day, but occasionally (rarely) might be 10 per day. Not that big of a deal, really. But I just want all of the spam gone. I don't want Akismet to even have to deal with it. So I install another filter, which you can see in the comments section of any page. Like this:
http://www.phonelosers.org/comics-for-plaers/#commentsBefore posting a comment, you have to type the secret word into the box. The first word I used was CACTUS. And I just wrote, in plain text, "If you're a human, type CACTUS into that box over there." That slowed the spam a little, but I still got a lot of it. I figure the spam robots are reading the word CACTUS and typing it in. Robots are smart like that. So I replace the plain text CACTUS with a GIF which reads CACTUS.
Still not much difference. So I change the word CACTUS in that image to a picture of a cactus instead. It can't read a picture, right? I wait a day, only to notice there's still not much difference in the amount of spam I'm receiving. I easily get over 300 spam attempts per day, all of it caught by Akismet.
So I think, maybe the spam robots are just remembering what my code word is. So I change the word to TREE and I put an image of a tree next to the verification box. This should surely stop them, right? I made this change an hour ago and so far I've gotten 15 spam attempts. That might be a little slower, but DAMMIT!
How are the spam robots figuring out the code word? They must be bypassing the script somehow, right? The script I'm using for word verification is called
Challenge. It actually lets you put math problems into it that users must solve to post a comment. But I don't want to make users solve math problems just to post a comment. Even simple ones.
I know I should just be happy that Akismet catches 99% of the spam for me already. But I want it all gone. I don't want to have to delete 1 or 2 spams per day. I'm much too busy and important to deal with petty things like this!
