GregHowley.com

Really sorry guys. But the stupid spammers have been making life hell for me. Somebody set up a bot to submit a new spam comment about every 5-10 minutes. Last night, I was visiting my site about every hour, each time deleting roughly a dozen spam comments. Had I left it overnight, I'd likely have had close to a hundred to manually delete.

Until now, my self-coded spam prevention measures have been enough. But now I need to come up with more so that I can re-enable commenting. Here are some ideas:

• rel = nofollow This will prevent google from counting the links, and thus eliminate the point of the comment spam. The spammers' search results won't be improved, but it won't stop the spam comments, so it's not really a solution.
• Stupid question form - I could add something like What is four plus one?, What color is the sky? or Type the word yellow in the box to the form, and have a list of like a hundred questions. If the text in that textbox doesn't match the answer, the comment fails. Not sure about this one.
• Require Approval - I could require all comments to be approved before appearing. This fixes things up nicely, but I always liked being able to see comments as soon as you submit them. Also, making the database change is a pain.
• Whitelist - I've considered some form of whitelisting, since generally the same half dozen people comment on my site. I shouldn't really ban all others, but maybe others would need approval, or have to answer the stupid question form.

I'd be interested in hearing your feedback, although you can't comment here. Send me an email, instant message or a twitter and let me know which approach(es) you think might be best. In the meantime, I've got to apologize to Kris, who apparently wrote a goddamn masters thesis in the comment form and lost it.