Fight against SPAMBots - continues

I thought I had the SPAM comment issue under control by moderating the comments. By moderating the comments, I could review the comments and decide whether to publish them or not. But spammers were a step ahead of me and they started spamming on trackbacks. I didn't mind as none of those comments / trackbacks were getting published and it was easy to delete them at once.

Lately those spammers started spamming so heavily that at times there were approximated 450 SPAM comments / trackbacks on my website and I was spending 10 minutes every 1 hour just clearing the SPAM. I had enough of it.

I searched around the internet for solutions when I stumbled across one discussion forum which guided administrators to block the SPAM trackbacks programmatically by not allowing certain key words. This looks like a promising solution, but we all know the number of variations or even words that can be used as a SPAM. I thought that if I blocked the SPAM programmatically by comparing it against a list of keywords, I would seriously hamper the website performance and degrade the visitor experience.

Instead I have chosen to disable trackbacks altogether except for authenticated users. I am sorry for the inconvenience that this will cause my readers, but I feel that this is the best course of action keeping security and sanctity of the website in mind. As we all know it is very difficult to keep unwanted things out because we don't know what is unwanted or bad, but we definitely know what is good and what we want and its easy to keep a track of it.

For the record, I use COREBlog2.0 version 0.8 on Plone running on Zope.