Prefiltering spam

Filed in archive Anti-Spam Tools on May 6, 2007

Comment spam filters have become our reality, sometimes it seems even to me that more people are there to seed the spam than to leave earnest comments. Not one spam filter is 100 percent spam proof, but there is a way to up its accuracy.

We all know how wonderful comment spam filters are, Askimet being the top one, but there is more or less false positives, which end up in trash if you're not careful. 5thirtyone suggests using a filter to filter the comment spam filter:

"Simple Spam Filter adds an additional SubPanel menu option to your Administrative Comments view titled "Spam Filter". The "Spam Filter" view presents a summarized list of keywords identified as likely spam. By reviewing the list and deleting comments based on obvious keyword matches, moderated comments are deleted from the database reducing the number of comments to sift through."

You can download and install the Tan Tan Simple Spam Filter for free. The author says the filter will:

"If a comment tests positive for one of these patterns, the plugin will immediately reject the comment and throw an error with an explaination of why the comment was rejected. If a real person tries to comment but gets rejected by this filter (they'll have to try really hard), they will be presented with an additional step to confirm that their comment is legitimate (with a pseudo CAPTCHA like process). They could also use the error message to easily go back to edit their comment so that it doesn't get blocked."

Nice one Tan Tan!