Making Progress Against Spam

The fight against comment and TrackBack spam is an ongoing battle, and it's worth reviewing some of the new options available for managing the attacks.

Since our last roundup, which covered many mod_security options as well as the DSBL plugin, some popular new choices have come to the forefront.

Cameron Marlow of Blogdex fame has created MT-Keystrokes, a proof-of-work plugin that requires human input and a javascript interpreter in the commenter's browser.

If you're facing TrackBack attacks, you'll want to enable the DSBL plugin (as well as MT-Blacklist, if you don't already have it) and a nice complement to these functions is MT-Moderate, which enables moderation of TrackBacks. Jay's got some other techniques listed in his recent roundup as well, including ways to ban comments based on content, for filtering out comments that use numeric entities or comments that use ASCII characters.

As always, you should review our Guide to Combatting Comment Spam if you want to know more about the hows and whys of the battle against TrackBack and comment spam. Many of the pros and cons of these tactics are discussed there. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the battle against spammers, one must-read site is Ann Elisabeth's Spam Huntress, where she fights the good fight daily.