Fighting spam - Let's try again
March 5, 2009
Jean
A while ago we developed our own little in-house system to fight comment spam on UGAL. Using non rocket science, we were able to catch the vast majority of spam submitted to our websites. Unfortunately, we still have pages with tens of spam comments that our system is not able to catch.
So let's try again, with rocket science this time: as of a week ago, UGAL is using Akismet to detect comment spam. Akismet is a product of Automattic, the developer of Wordpress (the blog platform). Everytime a comment is made to your website, we run it through Akismet in the background to determine if it is spam or not.
The initial numbers look good, but we still have spam that goes undetected. Chances are that it is due to our implementation (we are supposed to report false positives to help the system learn from its mistakes, which we do not for now). We are confident that we will be able to improve the situation in the coming weeks. In the mean time, we encourage you to turn comments off on the pages targeted by spammers (they seem to always like the same ones).
A personal note to the spammers: me like you not.