I spoke a bit too soon. When I mentioned last week that I had made a serious dent in the spam wars, little did I know that the spammers would strike back hard.
It seems, I’ve caught a new wave of spammers. These ones are not trying to sell anything directly (aka bootleg pharmaceuticals) but instead are simply trying to drive clicks to bullshit pages whose only purpose is to gain ad revenue without providing any content at all.
These new spams all have links to bogus sites like “1qualitylinks.info”, “1mybookmarks.info”, and “topnetsites.info”. These spams have key words that they hope to drive traffic, thus my previous methods weren’t blocking them.
Yesterday alone, I got 68 additional spams caught by Akismet when before it was down to 4 or 5 a day.
So, I had to add another level of protection. This new plugin, called JS Spam Block, is rather interesting. All it does is add a bit of javascript in the comment field. It sends a script to the browser trying to leave a comment. If your browser is .js enabled (almost all them are) you are allowed to comment and the user doesn’t even know they were approved. If you don’t have javascript enabled (most spam posting bots do not) it prompts you to simply enter a number to continue to prove you’re human. If you enter the number, you can post. Obviously, to get an automated bot to do this is significantly tougher. Genius really.
This one appears to be working. Since installation last night, I’ve only had 5 spams caught. The rest were blocked by my various other methods. I have learned to never say I have solved the problem. With spam, there simply is no solution, although the feds are trying.
One more shot in the never ending war.