Balance
I’ve been trying to figure out the best balance between Spam filtering and freedom to comment on this site. The day before yesterday, in the evening, I decided to conduct an experiment and see what the results were.
What was here
Before conducting the experiment, I’d been using the same solution that I had before. Akismet and Tan Tan Noodles Simple Spam Filter had been my trusty resistance fighters who tirelessly kept my site pretty much free from comments made by that scourge of the earth known as blog spammers. I’ve been reasonably happy with this dynamic duo as the amount of work required by me was pretty low and people who wanted to could comment freely on this site and see their comment appear right away. I didn’t have to manually approve the comments and the person who commented didn’t have to do anything elaborate to have their comment appear here.
The Experiment
I had decided to see what would happen if I disabled Joe Tan’s Simple Spam Filter.I wanted to know two things – how many comments actually do get moderated because of their spammy nature, and, how many of those comments are legitimate. I’ve been quite lucky so far. About once or twice a week, there’d be a comment added to the list of spam comments in my moderation queue – and, it was put there because it should have been.
As I alluded to with my previous post, I enabled first comment moderation, in case Akismet wasn’t up to the task. Over night, I had received 14 comments that had been sent to the queue and they were all sent there with good reason. They were illegitimate crapola and should have been set on fire and fed to their owners. That part of the experiment seemed to have gone well.
Then, for the bigger risk. I disabled first comment moderation to see if Akismet would handle everything and do it correctly. I didn’t really want to have to go through a pile of comments and delete them from the published site. Over the next 16 or 17 hours, I received 64 comments that were marked as spam. They were waiting for me in the spam queue. I read through them all and determined that they had been legitimately flagged as spam comments.
So, Akismet had saved me from the spammers. This is great! On the face of things, there was no real difference to those who read the content here.
The Conclusion and My Action
I’ve concluded that Akismet can be the only spam moderation solution that you really need on your site. It seems to filter the illegitimate comments properly and doesn’t flag any false positives. The things that get filtered are queued for me to review, if necessary, in case they were put there in error. It does a great job.
I’ve enabled Simple Spam Filter again, though, as the way it works is a great compliment to Akismet. It was not decided as a single solution, but rather a prefilter for Akismet. This task is handled well. With SSF enabled, I don’t have to search through the spam queue to see if any comments there are legitimate. And, don’t kid yourself, if you have a list if quarantined comments, you’ll go through them, just to be sure.
With SSF, comments with more than 5 links get stopped and any comments with Regex code in them gets stopped. As well, comments with words commonly used by spammers are stopped. The good new is that, if someone gets stopped by the filter, they have a chance to moderate their own comment as approved by clicking the button on the page showing them why their comment was blocked. Then, the comment goes through. I don’t have to worry about reading through the Akismet queue often, as the really obvious robot-generated spam is deleted automatically, as the robot doesn’t click the button to allow their comment to be read. Once a spam commenter gets past the SSF by clicking through the first block, they get caught by Akismet. The positive thing for me is that I don’t have to actively pore through several comments just to find out they’re spam and need deleting. The robots’ inaction at the gateway is enough.
The potential is there for every comment to pass SSF, as the moderation is handled by the commenter. I think that this is pretty good evidence that there is a problem. My little site gets more illegitimate comments in one day than the number of articles I publish in a whole year.
This experiment has solidified my feeling that I’ve chosen the best solution for my needs. So, SSF and Akismet remain as my dynamic freedom fighting duo. I did remove a few words from the potential list (ones that I find that I use a lot). I figure that if they’re used by a spammer, Akismet will stop them or SSF will due to them using another tactic that is blocked before publication.
