Comment Spam

Other than using Akismet, the anti-comment-spam measures I have in place here are pretty primitive. I block some common patterns and blacklist some IPs. (I don’t have plans to make it any more sophisticated since I’ve told myself any new blog engineering effort needs to go to the new Django-based version, not the old PHP5 one.)

I was looking at server logs this week and noticed an unusual number of POST requests, then realized that they were foiled comment-spam attempts. I counted them up:

> cat access_log | grep 'POST /news/' | wc
1937   34554  336503

That logfile is only six days old, so that’s over 300 comment spam attempts per day, about 99% of which are blocked.

Spammers. Sigh.