It seems our blog is starting to get some attention. Unfortunately, it is by comment spammers. Realizing that dropping their links across blogs everywhere is a great way to up their search engine rankings, comment spammers make fake comments on posts, much to the annoyance of bloggers everywhere.
To fight this, today I installed the WordPress plug-in “Spam Karma.”
Spam Karma was a very simple install. I downloaded a .zip file from the link above, unzipped the file, uploaded one file to an existing directory on our blog server, and put the rest of the files in a new directory. Then, I logged into our blog’s adminstration interface and activated the plug-in. Once that was set up, Spam Karma immediately found 27 comment spams.
Spam Karma works by comparing every comment submitted to a “blacklist” of known spammers and words often used in comment spam (like poker and various prescription drugs). Comments are given a score based on the likelihood that they are spam. Comments with a low score are automatically posted, comments with a high score (obvious spam) are deleted, and comments that fall in the middle are sent to a moderation queue. For a more in-depth explanation of Spam Karma’s process, check out Introduction to Spam Karma.
Oh, so it’s kinda like SpamAssassin but for blog comments. Nifty.