Comment spam
Posted by Ben on December 22nd, 2004
If you run your own blog, you’ve probably had to deal with comment spam. Even here on my own lightly-visited site (500 MB/month typical transfers), I’m getting 5-10 per day. Seriously, who are these people fooling? You’re putting ads up for absolute crap on the sites of people who are least likely to visit your site and buy counterfeit Viagra (V!@g.a.r.a), play texas hold-em, or buy the Paris Hilton video. Heck, I’ve even made fun of the spammers publicly for trying to do dumb things. Too bad credit card companies don’t provide a list of fake credit card numbers you can use on spammers that will process through the credit card system, but they don’t get their money. I’d love to screw a few of them out of a few grand. Merry Christmas! 
Fortunately, WordPress does have a pretty good system for moderating comments. If you put a link in the comment, it automatically goes to moderation. Then, if it has a banned word, IP address, etc., it gets automatically /dev/null’d.