Re: [Blosxom-users] Net::Akismet and feedback plugin

[Matthijs K. <mat...@st...>]

Hi Kevin,

> I'm using Frank Hecker's feedback plugin
> (http://hecker.org/blosxom/feedback) for comments at my blog. While the
> plugin works well, especially its moderation features, I find that it
> does not seem to do a very good job of filtering out spam, even when I
> enable the optional Net::Akismet functionality.
I'm also using the same plugin, but a slightly older version (0.20)
which doesn't even have Akismet support.

I've also struggled with the spam problem, but got it pretty much under
control by adding the following lines to feedback's is_spam function:

    return 1 if ($$params_ref{'comment'} =~ /http/);
    return 1 if ($$params_ref{'comment'} =~ /^Welcome!!!/);
    # Block coments with only letters, numbers and dashes
    return 1 if ($$params_ref{'comment'} =~ /^[a-zA-Z0-9-]*$/);
    return 1 if ($$params_ref{'comment'} =~ /<a href=  ><\/a>*/);
    return 1 if ($$params_ref{'name'} =~ /only/);
    return 1 if ($$params_ref{'url'} =~ /geocities/);

Most of these are just checks I added after getting specific types of
spam repeatedly, but the most effective check is the first one. This has
the side effect that people can't put complete urls with http:// prefix
in their comments (the url field still works as normal), but I changed
the error message to tell people to just remove the http:// part, since
I don't think feedback automatically turns urls into links anyway.

> Any idea what the problem might be? Is it possible that the Akismet bits 
> are turning away a lot of spam, but a lot is still getting in? (I know 
> Aiksmet isn't perfect.) What I've done as a workaround is to check for 
> URL's in the comment field, and mark those as spam (since all the spam 
> appears to come from linkbots). That seems to be helping, but it also 
> isn't the way things are supposed to work. Any suggestions are appreciated.
Hmm, I actually started replying before reading this part of your mail.
So, that's pretty much what I do, which helps terribly well (especially
since I only get a handful of comments each year or something, so it's
not especially cumbersome for a lot of people).

As for other solutions, I haven't actually looked into other solutions,
and as I said, there wasn't Akismet support when I installed the
feedback plugin (say, a year or five ago? ;-p).

Gr.

Matthijs