Schonhose

Over the last few months several threads have been posted on the Pixelpost forum regarding SPAM comments. In some of these threads the author boldly claims that Pixelpost isn’t stopping any SPAM. Well, since December 28th, 2006 I have installed a SPAMlog addon on my blog. Basically, what this addon does is keeping track if and why a comment is blocked.

First I think I have to elaborate on my settings, so here they are. I use the <TOKEN> setting from Pixelpost, along with a 30 seconds SPAMflood protection setting and a maximum of three URLS in a comment. Besides that I use the http://BL addon (more info about this addon) and I have installed Defensio addon for Pixelpost.

So now we know the configuration let’s show some stats from the last 743 days shall we?

It seems my photoblog received a total of 31897 comments (43 comments per day). A total of 2457 comments actually made it through the defensive lines of both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon. Defensio managed to catch 2256 comments as SPAM, so this leaves out 201 comments. It turns out that 70 of these comments were SPAM, but these slipped through before the Defensio addon was installed (The Defensio addon was installed a few months after the initialization of the SPAMlog).

These are the numbers, but what happened to the initial 31897 – 2457 = 29440 comments which were blocked by both Pixelpost and the http://BL addon?

Let me break that number down: Pixelpost internal measures took care of 17194 of these comments while the http://BL addon took care of the other 12246 comments. Basically this says that the measures in Pixelpost are capable of catching at least 50% of all SPAM comments.

So what is the internal Pixelpost method that stops most of the SPAM?

• 887 comments contained words listed in ban or moderation list
• 10379 comments used an incorrect token
• 2 commenters waited too long before posting (30 minutes)
• 156 comments were posted to rapidly in succession (SPAM flood)
• 5403 comments contained too many URLs (3)
• 114 comments contained an URL on the blacklist
• 210 comments were not allowed (commenting disabled)
• 41 commenters used an invalid e-mail address

As can be seen the token protection is responsible for 60% of the SPAM stopped by Pixelpost own defensive measures. Feel free to comment on my analysis.