Aiya, the spam!

This is (almost) completely unrelated to Chung Kuo, but I wanted to mention the spam issue on the site and forums. Not too long after this site went live back in early February, it started seeing the occasional spam comment, which would usually be something to the effect of “Wow your site is so great lol I never thought about it you make a good point click here” and I’d have to go in and manually clear all that out.

Then, after The Forums opened, the nonsense really started to fly. Every day, I had to go remove spam posts, oftentimes in other languages and in attempts to sell totally random crap like automobile parts. I tried banning the IPs that these spammers were coming from. No help. Then, I tried several types of captchas during (the squiggly letters that supposedly aren’t machine readable) during the registration process. That didn’t work either.

BUT… it’s now been a few weeks since there’s been any spam anywhere on the site. This is what finally did the trick:

• On the blog (WordPress): Akismet. Akismet catches the spam comments before they post and relegates them to a reviewable spam folder in the WordPress admin panel. It works perfectly. The downside is, for a small non-personal blog (like this one), it’s $5 a month. One one hand, that adds up a little over the course of the year, but on the other hand, I just spent more than that at Taco Bell. It’s worth the money.
• One the boards (phpBB): Q&A. Any newly registering user has to answer a simple query (of my choosing) that can’t be machine-answered and isn’t easily parsed from Google search results. The answer to the question will easily be known to anyone who’s ever picked up a Chung Kuo book, new or old. It’s so much simpler than graphic captchas, but somehow so much more effective. Since this has gone live, not a single fake registration (or spam post) has shown up.

So, in the event that you’re starting your own blog or forum, I highly recommend that you check these out. On the flipside, if you’re having issues here (comments on blog posts not showing up or unable to register for the boards), hit me up at ofgiftsandstones <[at]> gmail.com so that I can figure it out.

Zaijian for now!