Getting spammed

Askimet and comment spam

In the last few weeks this blog started getting tons of comment spam. The more visibility I got, the more spam I received. That’s the equation.

Some days ago, I decided to go for the famous Askimet, as manually moderating and deleting spam comments was starting to take me too much time.

Since I installed it, in a short time, Askimet identified 51 comments as spam and queued them for deletion. It just missed to catch one spam comment. Nice job!

By the way, I noticed comment spam is starting to affect also some of my clients’ websites, not only those WordPress- or CMS-based, but even old websites and CGI-based forms and guestbooks. This will cause (and is already causing) me lots of extra work to implement ways of blocking spam, since there is not always an easy and effecient way as Askimet. And personally I don’t like to use CAPTCHAs, as I think they lower the usability, accessibility and friendlyness level of a website. Moreover CAPTCHAs just look too ugly.

This is really a bad problem to solve.
Everyday I read of new solutions as well as of new methods to crack the newly invented solutions, leaving me a bit confused on this point.