Mephisto Inverse Captcha plugin updated
posted: November 19th, 2007 · by: Sven
Just a short note for those of you who are using my Mephisto Inverse Captcha plugin:
I’ve recieved some feedback that the way the plugin was implemented apperently caused problems in fcgi environments. I’ve simplified the plugin loading quite a bit and now it seems to work fine.
I’ve got it running here on my own blog, too, with Rails 2.0PR and Mephisto rev2983 and it continues to work like a charm :) Actually, I have no spam comments thanks to it.
If you further encounter any problems please let me know :)
Inverse Captcha Anti-Comment-Spam Technique: Now A Regular Mephisto Plugin
posted: September 25th, 2007 · by: Sven
After I had revamped my initial experimental approach to the “Inverse Captcha” anti-spam technique as a regular Mephisto Plugin lately I have promised to explain how you can use it to get rid of your blog comment spam.
This plugin is getting a bunch of additional attention these days, especially after it was linked to in Quarks’ Ruby on Rails Security Guide. So, some additional information is past due. There you go.
Read the rest of this entryUpgraded to Mephisto Edge: various plugin fixes and updates
posted: September 5th, 2007 · by: Sven
Ok. I’ve upgraded my blog to Mephisto Edge.
It’s been something like nine months since the last official 0.7.3 Noh-Varr release and in Rails time that’s a pretty long time. There’s a lot been happening in Rails Edge and it just made sense to catch up with these things a bit.
So I decided to invest the time to upgrade, do some fixes and cleanup and generally bring my blog setup in a better shape again. If you’re running Mephisto and consider an upgrade, some of the following observations and notes might be of interest for you.
Read the rest of this entryReport: 30 days with no blog spam on Mephisto!
posted: May 8th, 2007 · by: Sven
I promised to keep you posted with the results of my experimental ”outer spam floodgate” Mephisto extension. Tell you what. I’m super-happy with the results as I haven’t seen any blog spam this month! Yes, right. No spam.
Read the rest of this entryHow to add a floodgate to Mephisto's nearly perfect spam protection
posted: April 4th, 2007 · by: Sven
Mephisto comes with Akismet support baked right into its heart and it works like a charm. I’ve been totally pleased with it spotting nearly every spam comment and collecting them for later review and bulk deletion.
Now, 30 days later, I found it was time to clean up the spammy comments piles that Mephisto hunted down for me. Actually nearly 900 comments had piled up. Year, that’s 30 per day. I don’t think that’s that much compared to what others receive.
But to me 900 spam comments in 30 days is too much. I don’t want to spend the time to manually check 900 comments even if I’d have to do it only once a month. No way.
I thus revisited an idea that Damien Katz called “negative captcha”. I realized that I’ve actually had experiences with this type of “protection” and they’ve been pretty good.
Read the rest of this entryNo more trackbacks, right now. Sorry.
posted: August 1st, 2006 · by: Sven
I’ve just killed around 750 trackbacks – none of them hasn’t been spam.
Sigh. Ok, so I’ve deactivated trackbacks for all articles. UPDATE content SET allow_ping = 0.
Too bad.
Doable strategies against blog spam?
posted: May 20th, 2006 · by: Sven
My old Wordpress blog had the option to turn on “moderated comments”. That means that I’ve recieved an email notification about every comment asking me to “please moderate this comment”. The email contained a link to instantly approve and a link to reject the comment.
Sigh. My blog never has been linked to that extensively that I’d expected comment spam to become a problem in the first place. I’ve been wrong. Wordpress seems to allure blog spam like a light bulb flies on a midsummer evening. I recieved some hundred mail notifications per week, asking me to moderate cheap perfumes, pills and online bets (for the world cup, lately). Finally my email spam filter caught up and started to sort out the notifications from my own blog. Hum.
Having switched over to Typo I was curious about Typos anti-spam measurements and came up with some thoughts about possible “joint-forces” strategies against blog spam.
Read the rest of this entry