I am Sick of Dirty Spam (Installing Akismet in Silverstripe)

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Over the last day, several comments were posted to this blog that contained links to websites with very dodgy URLs. Essentially, all the links were to dirty websites that peddle content that I do not wish to see, or be associated with. Over the last week I have simply logged on regularly, and deleted any comments that were Spam. However, this still leaves a window during which that unwanted trash is visible on this website. This morning's dose of dirty spam motivated me to take the time to install Akismet, a comment spam filtering service.

The installation was surprisingly simple. The code for using Akismet is already included in the Silverstripe Blog module, and this page describes the installation procedure very well (it just took a few minutes to find). One odd thing is that one must register on WordPress in order to receive a free key for Akismet (warning, WordPress is one of the silly sites that will email your password back to you, so avoid reusing passwords that are used elsewhere).

Sadly, this spam filter alone will probably not completely stop spammers from posting their garbage on this website. In future, some form of "are you human" test may be required (e.g., ask the user to enter characters embedded in an image, etc.). Another option would be to disable comments altogether. Comments are not as important as they may seem. Most people will not even bother to read them. Nevertheless, it does add a little more interactivity to a website, so it would be a shame if a bunch of spammers rendered them useless.

It remains to be seen how well Akismet works. Differentiating between Spam and genuine content is not easy. I will be monitoring the posted comments in order to examine its performance. So far it has already stopped eight spam posts today.

Comments (2) | 27 August 2008