Comment Spam Resumes

May 30, 2009 in Wordpress by Ezra S F | 2 comments

Have spammers figured out how to pick reCAPTCHA‘s lock? All of a sudden I am getting hundreds of comment spam blocked by Akismet. When I added reCAPTCHA, it dropped to a few a month. Now 409 in a week.

Guess this is why layers of security are good.

UPDATE: Scanned through for false positives. The first word of many of them were Xanth characters: Bink, Chameleon, Dolph, Iris, Smash, Goldy, Grundy, Cherie, Chester, Roogna, Imbri.


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  1. Ben Maurer’s avatar

    Ben Maurer on May 30, 2009 at 11:00 am

    It’s perfectly normal for spam comments to appear as “blocked by akismet’ when using reCAPTCHA. This happens when a spammer submits a comment, but does not follow the browser redirect to the next page (which deletes the comment from the queue).

    It’s unfortunate that WordPress doesn’t have a better API for making this clear to the user.

  2. Ez’s avatar

    Ez on June 14, 2009 at 10:15 am

    I’m doubtful all this is coming from a human. If all this comment spam is coming from bots, then it is my mistake for listening to reCAPTCHA’s claim that it works for WordPress: “If you run a website that suffers from problems with spam, you can put reCAPTCHA on your site. For some applications (such as WordPress…), we have plugins that allow you to use reCAPTCHA without writing any code.” http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html