Thoughts, ideas, tips, musings, and pontifications (not necessarily in that order) by Ben Forta ...
NOTE: This is my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own.
I don't like moderated comments on blogs. Moderation hurts immediacy and creates the illusion of censorship. But, despite my best efforts at blocking spammers, too much comment spam is getting through, and that's not fair to commenters. And so, I have activated comment moderation on my blog. Sorry, but hopefully this will kill blog comment spam for good.
Actually, I've been using it for half a year or so. It cut out the vast majority of spam, but not all. And the few that got through somehow go through repeatedly, same comment on multiple messages. Perhaps there is more tuning I could do, but until I get to it moderation seems best.
To bad you can't tweak to have subscribed users, where new users would be moderated and existing users could comment freely. Something akin to Google and Yahoo Groups. Spam ruins it for everyone!
After I did this my spam dropped to 0(*). In fact, I was able to turn off CAPTCHA on my comments.
* So I did have one nit. When I turned off CAPTCHA, the Contact Me form began to get spammed. So for now I've forced CAPTCHA on for my Contact Me page, but have disabled it for comments.
Funny thing is that we were talking about this issue the other day on the RIApodcast. I use catpcha and moderation on my blogs. Some complain, but the spam is really that bad. I can only imagine it's worse for you Ben having a well known blog. I hope people will understand.
You should definitely check out Akismet. I don't know why the CF community has been so slow to adopt this product, but since adding it to BlogCFC over two years ago I have had less than 5 spam comments make it on to my blog.
Also, I'll say I'm not a huge fan of how Akismet is implemented in BlogCFC via CFFormProtect, mainly because it doesn't allow you to report ham/spam. (At least it didn't last time I looked.) This is a big part of what makes Akismet work so well and it is a shame that one of the major CF implementations doesn't make it easy to contribute back to the project. Also, the Akismet project specifically asks that you not use other spam protection methods as they may reduce the effectiveness of Akismet. While this is just a request and certainly not required, the CFFormProtect/BlogCFC implementation doesn't even allow for Akismet only protection.
Figured out your spam problem, if the user puts an email that is private domain rather than hotmail, yahoo, etc... its automatically spam.
Another safety precaution to secure yourself from spam is to make sure your domain information is kept Private, or leave out identifying markers for spammers to target you.
http://www.trajiklyhip.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/6/2...
After I did this my spam dropped to 0(*). In fact, I was able to turn off CAPTCHA on my comments.
* So I did have one nit. When I turned off CAPTCHA, the Contact Me form began to get spammed. So for now I've forced CAPTCHA on for my Contact Me page, but have disabled it for comments.
Also, I'll say I'm not a huge fan of how Akismet is implemented in BlogCFC via CFFormProtect, mainly because it doesn't allow you to report ham/spam. (At least it didn't last time I looked.) This is a big part of what makes Akismet work so well and it is a shame that one of the major CF implementations doesn't make it easy to contribute back to the project. Also, the Akismet project specifically asks that you not use other spam protection methods as they may reduce the effectiveness of Akismet. While this is just a request and certainly not required, the CFFormProtect/BlogCFC implementation doesn't even allow for Akismet only protection.
Another safety precaution to secure yourself from spam is to make sure your domain information is kept Private, or leave out identifying markers for spammers to target you.
Check the whois database: http://whois.domaintools.com/justinwright.us
I'm currently fixing this problem too.
P.S. Thanks for the additional threads helping for a new talk forum that i would like to make, and want secure too!
Good Luck!