Spam Problems, I Need Help
November 4th, 2007
For awhile, reCAPTCHA solved my WordPress spam problem. Then I started seeing a handful of spams, now I receive at least 5 per day in my moderation queue. I first blogged about this a bit over a month ago.
Here is a typical email I receive from my WordPress moderation queue:
Here is what the WordPress moderation queue looks like:
Is this from a trackback or did a human enter this comment? How can I tell the difference between comments and trackbacks?
What should I do next to fight spam on this blog? Disable trackbacks? Install some sort of trackback SPAM fighting plugin? Help!
Most people are just disabling trackbacks all together and just leaving direct comments.
Hi,
This is completely normal. Due to the way wordpress works, when reCAPTCHA marks a comment as spam, you’ll see it in your moderation queue. Our FAQ states:
reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so if you get moderation emails when spam comments are sent, you will get moderation emails for all spam comments with reCAPTCHA. We highly recommend turning off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.
@Ben, I’ll follow up directly via email, as well. I am completely confused by that FAQ entry. I just tried to submit bogus comments to my blog, both by leaving the CAPTCHA blank and by entering bad characters, and was unable to. The only way I can get a comment through is to type the correct words in reCAPTCHA.
How would a comment make it past reCAPTCHA and end up in the moderation queue in the first place? Either the CAPTCHA is cracked, or a human did it, right?
I use Akismet and it dumps 99% of my spam into it’s spam holder, which automatically deletes after an expiration period. I don’t use any captcha. I rarely get anything in the moderation queue (once a month maybe) and it’s about 50/50 spam. I somewhat rarely get spam through to my actual site (once a week maybe). And I very rarely get non-spam in the spam folder (once every 6 months). So, in general, I find it works great.