Very Bad Behavior

15 January 2007

I love Akismet. It’s very good at identifying comment spam and putting it to one side for me to review later. But my needs have been modest: it took more than 8 months for Akismet to trap the first 2,000 spam comments to this blog.

Then some invisible switch was thrown or critical mass reached out there in the dark underworld where these spammers live. In December I began to see between one and three hundred attempts per day, each one eating bandwidth and server resources. I couldn’t keep up, and as they arrived in bursts I saw performance problems.

So I added Bad Behavior to my arsenal. It doesn’t just quarantine spam, it blocks most of it outright – it never hits my server or database. Since I installed Bad Behavior a week ago only 5 spam attempts (out of 1100) got through to Akismet for my attention.

My life is my own again.

Category: digital history

Comments

6 responses to “Very Bad Behavior”

16 January 2007

Harry

I guess this is the silver lining to my low readership cloud. Aksimet has only caught 16 spam attempts in 2.5 months, and about 8 of those were me trying to respond to comments (a glitch). Nothing bad has made it through yet.

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16 January 2007

Eric Wittenberg

Thanks for the tip, Brian. I get TONS of spam to my site. Dr. Dave’s Sparm Karma catches 95% of it, but some gets through, and if this helps, all the better. We installed it last night.

Eric

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16 January 2007

Craighill Keeper

Thanks too! I installed it this morning on one blog and it already caught over 100 spams.

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16 January 2007

Brian

@Harry – I’m not sure it’s a matter of readership. More likely longevity. Once you’ve been out there a while, you get onto happy lists or something and the spammers swarm. I agree Akismet is good at not letting things through. I’ve never had spam actually publish to the site, as far as I know.

@Eric – hope this is a good steer for you. I’m really pleased so far. I did some research in advance and the word on the street on Bad Behavior is positive as well.

@CK – good on you. Glad to help. Wonder how long before the bad guys figure BB out?

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17 January 2007

Brett S.

Brian,

I took one look at Bad Behavior and figured it would help tremendously with my Civil War Top 100 site. It has been the target of numerous Turkish referral spammers, so it will be interesting to see how well Bad Behavior works. I also decided to add it to my Movable Type software. I’m not using the logging in either case, but I might try to move ahead with that at some future time. Thanks for pointing this one out!

Brett

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17 January 2007

Brian

Good luck Brett. I hope it works as well for you as it has me.

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