Geek Drivel has been getting a steady stream of comment spam almost since its inception, but it has really been bombarded with it over the last week or so. Spam Karma 2 does an excellent job of filtering them — in a year and a half, I can count the ones that have gotten through it on the fingers of one hand, with a few to spare. But my blog comments are one of the few places where I let my inner control-freak have free rein, in that I glance through everything that it catches to make sure they’re not legitimate comments instead. The volume was starting to irritate me, so I went hunting for a better way.

It looks like I’ve found it.

The author of Yet Another WordPress Anti-Spam Plugin (Yawasp), Sven Kubiak, had an interesting insight: comment spam-bots, like essentially every program to date, are stupid. Ones that are targeted specifically to WordPress rely on the fact that every WordPress blog’s comment form is the same, so make some minor changes to it and they’ll fail (and you can easily detect them too). Mix in a hidden field or two, and generic comment-spam bots can be detected and blocked as well. Best of all, a human visitor won’t even notice it running, and the design means that there is zero chance of a false positive with it.

I installed it two days ago. The results so far: 52 “birdbrained Spambots” have been detected and blocked, and there hasn’t been a single spam message for me to examine. 🙂

I’m sure it’s not a permanent answer — a program could be written to detect the hidden fields and avoid them, and almost certainly will be if this method starts getting used a lot. But Spam Karma 2 is still waiting behind it, to catch any that do get past it.

Bye bye, spam comments. :-p

UPDATE: A week after installing Yaswap, it has blocked 77 spam-bots, and I haven’t had a single spam get through it to be caught by Spam Karma 2. (There was one spam comment that got through both of them, but I can’t blame either one for missing it.)