Yes, comment spam is everywhere.  Spammers will never stop trying to find new ways to get their silly links into other peoples blogs.  Even though almost every blog puts the nofollow attribute on the comments, spammers still think that their site will be boosted because of the inbound links.

I recently upgraded to BlogEngine 1.6 on this blog and found that we suddenly were being attacked by 250+ spammers a day trying to get their comments on the blog.  But our existing VistaDB Blog (was running 1.5) didn’t have this problem.  What was the difference?  Was it something new in BE 1.6?  Or was it something we had done on the VistaDB blog differently?

It turns out that spammer target a few phrases they know are used by default in certain blog engines.  They already have code in their bots that know how to fill out the forms on these blogs, so they are looking for the default phrases.

Configure Filters Correctly

First thing is the make sure your Akismet is setup correctly and you have a valid key.  One non-obvious thing is that 1.6 of BE introduced a bug that allows for more comment spam to get through because if the last filter says the comment is OK the comment is allowed.

You can change this behavior by simply moving the AkismetFilter to the bottom.  Drop its priority to 2, leave the StopForumSpam at priority 1.

This is what my settings look like the day I reset the filters and moved their order.

This change alone cut about 60% of the spam that was getting through by simply having Akismet be the last entry.  But you can also do a few more things to through off spammers.

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We are going to unify the blog to this one blog, rather than having one per product or technology.  Each product will have it’s own category on the blog, so if you are only interested in one specific product you can just grab that one RSS Feed. This allows us to blog on a single location, but gives you the ability to subscribe to only what you want to read.

Blog Categories

The current blog categories are as follows.  Each is for a specific target of user, but you may be interested in all of them.  The Infinite Codex site will show all of these by default.  But the product sites will only show a feed of their category.

From the main page you can see the categories on the right side of the screen.  The little orange RSS logo next to each category is a feed of only that category.  You can subscribe directly through that logo to any category.

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