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Dan Wilson
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Comment Spam Reduced to 0
Posted By : Dan Wilson
October 13, 2008 6:51 PM
Whaddya mean? Spam on nodans.com?
Blame popularity, notoriety or just plain old dumb luck. The Nodans.com blog has been recently attacked by a particularly motivated spammer crew operating from IP addresses in China and Russia. This meant endlessly going into my blogCFC administration and removing any spam posts from the night before. Annoying, redundant and frustrating.
Sounds Annoying, Redundant and Frustrating, what did you do?
In a moment of intense frustration, I pulled every IP address in my block list and wrote a script to block the entire Class A address for that specific spammer. Even though this solution would block whole countries and over 2 billion people from adding their comments to the conversation on nodans.com, it was a decent tradeoff to not deal with these persistent spammers.
Hmm... Seems drastic, like killing a fly with a shotgun
As the Rage subsided, I realized that even that Nuclear option was really only a temporary solution. I'd be forced to chase an endless stream of IP addresses and would still subject my readers to assaults of Viagra, Batteries and WoW gold. There had to be another way...After a litte effort, I reached the 0 Comment Spam solution
0 Comment Spam? Do Tell!
Jake Munson wrote a library called CFFormProtect. This library protects any form from robotic spam and well as human entered spam. It has all sorts of tests that it uses to grade comments as spamorific or legit and blocks the spamorific ones from posting. Imagine if ColdFusion had an IsSpam() function.
How long did it take you to implement?
From start to finish, about 20 minutes. That includes downloading the project, reading the docs, and altering the appropriate parts of BlogCFC.
That's it? Why didn't you do it sooner?
A good question. I've asked myself that. A few times.
And you have gotten 0 Comment Spam?
Yeah, 0. Not a single one. The weeks leading up to this I had been assaulted from numerous sources, sometimes as many as 30 comment spam a night. Now I get 0.
What are you waiting for? Go Download CFFormProtect today!
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CFFormProtect will replace the need for CAPTCHA.
I guess I forgot to turn of CAPTCHA...it is off now...
DW
Sounds great Dan (and Jake).
I've been using Akismet (on Wordpress) for almost 2 years and it's only let a handful of comments through the filter.
Not bad considering I hit 90,000 spam comments last week!
Interesting to note is that you can use Akismet with CFFormProtect...you just need an API key. Well worth it if you ask me :)
me
Sounds great Dan. Care to share the mods that you made to BlogCFC with us lazy bastards?
(Testing if I am blocked)
Akismet is awesome! I can't tell you how many spams I've caught on my <a href="http="http://lawofhollywoodland.wordpress.com">c... justice</a> blog.
good day for you
I've been using Akismet (on Wordpress) for almost 2 years and it's only let a handful of comments through the filter.
thanks for the share..nice website good read
This post addressed all the question I had and provided great answers. Thanks for sharing.
bright future for ColdFusion? I really hope so~!!
Thanks for your post!I'll come back~
Great article, thanks!
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very cool. so do you still need to use CAPTCHA or does the cfformprotect negate the need for that? or is it a matter of using both for max protection?
just curious, as i see you still have CAPTCHA enabled :)