A quick administrative note…
I’m fed up with Akismet crashing the database every couple of weeks, so I’ve ditched it in favor of Spam Karma as the solution for all of my comment spam fighting needs. I’m still tweaking things, however, so if you post a comment and it’s not immediately approved, don’t be alarmed. It’s just the filter being overzealous (I wonder what would happen if I increased the severity level?).
Also, I disabled the nifty AJAX dynamic commenting feature, as it didn’t play nice with the change.
Guess I’m not Web 2.0 anymore.
Heh. Spam Karma is awesome. It catches all the spam on my blog with 99% success. I can only remember having to deal with, like, 5-8 spams manually after installing it.
The super-high security settings are really quite overzealous, and I remeber having to restore at least 10-15 legit comments after I bumped the security level one above normal, due to some heavy spam attack.
But other than that, it’s quite a good spam blocker. Just as a little tip, add a disclaimer line saying that you have SK2 installed in the “Note:” part below this comment box ;).
Well, hopefully there won’t be any need for a disclaimer once I’ve got everything tweaked just right.
I thought you didn’t like Suzumiya Haruhi.
Ooooh, good timing. I was getting really tired of Akismet but I didn’t feel like looking for something else. Let’s see now, shall we?
I have no problems at all with Akismet.
For its stated purpose, it worked great. But it liked to optimize the comments table in the database every so often, and when it did, it had a tendency to launch the process an infinite number of times. Eventually, it’d crash the database and I’d have to restart the MySQL service. Unfortunately, I don’t have the privileges to do that, so I’d have to file a trouble ticket with my host and wait. It made for a lot of unnecessary downtime.
SK2 is very, very good. If you can, you might want to put Bad Behaviour 2 in front of it (as BB2 prevents the spambot from posting at all, which takes some of the load off of SK2). I’m running that combination and I just plain don’t see spam at all.
As for “Web 2.0″… eh. *shrug*
Thanks for the tip, Greyduck. I know a lot of people use the Bad Behavior/Spam Karma combo with excellent results, so I went ahead and installed it.
The only bad thing (or probably good, i dont know).. is that you have to approve all comments, so just imagine if you had like 50 comments and 49 arent blog spam… its a hard but necesary task…
over…
^_^
whoa… is it like a lot of work to be your kinda guy?
Death note!!! =[)
I just installed it on my site which I’m juust setting up.
As for the “Web 2.0″ thing, is that AJAX thing, is that enabled by default? This is my first production WordPress install.
And for me, in my case, my machine is just that. Mine. As in I personally own it and therefore have total control (read: “responsibility”) over it.
Curious, are you on a shared hosting server, i.e. multiple customers on the same machine? I would prefer a dedicated server for my purposes, plus I by golly want bare-metal access to my system, dammit!
–Ian.
Ummm… oops. I meant to sign it like this. :)
I’ve been using spam karma for a while, and it works great.
I never really did like Akismet.
Stick with the Spam Karma/Bad Behavior Setup it will work better that way.
I’m new to this whole WordPress thing (been resisting it because it’s a PHP thing with a LOT of security reports on it), so you’ll have to bear with me.
I take I’ll need Bad Behavior to make it work well? Does one augment the behavior of the other? Inquiring minds want to know…
In any event, I linked the site in question above so you can check it out. (It’s for my fansub group; we’re subbing Kanon.)
Spam Karma works just fine on its own… Bad Behavior takes some of the load off of Spam Karma, however, so if you combine them, everything (may) work more efficiently. Depends on your setup, I suppose. That said, Akismet works just fine as well. My troubles were unique to my setup, I think.
Hmmm, what kind of setup are you running on, i.e. is it a shared or dedicated server? If it’s a shared server, I somehow wouldn’t be surprised. In my case, it’s sorta both. Shared because many other people have sites on it, but dedicated because it’s my machine (it’s presently colocated at work). So if I crash it, I don’t get to scream at anyone. Instead, my users scream at me. ;)
Or were there different aggravating factors involved?
Shared. I think it’s more of a database issue, though… like I said, unique. Unfortunately, it’s an undocumented problem, so I didn’t even know where to start as far as troubleshooting was concerned. I tried removing the call for the offending process from the Akismet code (best I can tell, it wasn’t a required process), but it just killed the plugin entirely.
In the end, it was easier to just switch to Spam Karma.
Hmmm, true enough. It may depend pretty heavily on which version of MySQL they’re running. I know of a number of 3.23.x installs still going, and I myself am running 4.0.x under Debian (seriously thinking of taking the Ubuntu plunge) and there’ve been a fair number of releases since, like the 4.2.x series and the 5.0.x series. That, the PHP client code (there are three MySQL client packages available for PHP, PHP’s own, MySQL AB’s own, and I think via an abstraction layer whose name eludes me at present; in any event, I don’t remember whose the third is, and I’m more a Perl guy).
By no means am I an SQL wiz (MySQL, PostgreSQL or otherwise), though I know enough how to get something going under Linux and FreeBSD. :) I just haven’t gone the direction you’ve gone yourself (though I do miss Movable Type. Damn you Six Apart!).
Wow, this thing managed to grab this one guy who’d been giving me crap almost instantly. Well, it’s only the second time he’s done this to me, and it’s mainly been on IRC. I advertised the site in my channel’s topic (my channel’s on Rizon), and when the guy tried to spam the board, it stopped him dead in his tracks.
I went to my site’s logs, found his IP address, then connected to the Cisco router ahead of my webserver. Then I unceremoniously did the following:
ip route (dork’s IP address) 255.255.255.255 Null0
That guy ain’t going anywhere anytime soon on my site. ANYWHERE on my site. I’m bit-bucketing ALL his traffic, web or otherwise! >;)