Blog spam

For a while I have been using comment moderation to prevent spam comments on this site but that just doesn't work. Even though none of them ever got published, the amount of spam comments in the approval queue kept increasing every day. Since the beginning of this week, there has been a huge peak in the amount of spam comments, many thousands a day. Spam bots were submitting comments faster than I could delete them from the approval queue. It got so bad that this even affected the load avg on the server (its a simple VPS).

So I just wiped the entire approval queue directly. I know I removed some valid comments (sorry Charlotte), but going through the entire list would have taken way to long.

As of today, I added a simple math captcha and disabled comment moderation on this site. Lets hope that stops most of the spam. If that doesn't work, I'll start enabling spam scanning modules. All this spam prevention is such a huge waste of resources..

Some already noticed that, unlike many others, I published one of my email addresses on the about page instead of the typical contact form. The reason is rather simple, I already have pretty decent spam filtering for email, so most spam just doesn't get through.
But if I use a contact form, I will need to reinvent the entire spam scanning process again on the webserver. The mail scanner won't have enough information to detect all spam messages; no reputation based filtering because all the messages originate from the webserver, no detecting forged mail headers and the like,..
Just let them send spam mails, they'll get dropped anyway ;)