Mr Papa’s World is constantly under attack from spammers. Luckily, I have some pretty good tools in place to stop these idiots. I thought I would pass along some statistics from spam attacks and how effective my tools (I didn’t write them) have been at stopping them.
I run Akismet which attempts to stop comment spam. In the approximately 6 months that I have been running it, Akismet has block 6495 comment spam attempts to date. Most of these spam bots are attempting to post comments about drugs, gambling or sex things. You the reader of Mr Papa’s World see very little of this as its been very effective. Occasionally, a rare spam comment gets through. Every once in a while there is a false positive too. I still try to review all the spam caught by Akismet and make sure it really is spam.
Akismet is actually not kept very busy these days. About one month ago, I installed Bad Behavior to stop spam bots before they actually get to my site and use up bandwidth. It too has been effective and thus the spam bots are stopped before they ever even can make a spam comment for Akismet to catch. Bad Behavior is stopping approximately 15,000 spam attacks every 7 days.
Bad Behavior and Akismet have proven to be a very effective tool in stopping spam from Mr Papa’s World and not wasting bandwidth.
In addition to the spam comments, the spam bots have attempted to overpower the shoutbox on the right hand sidebar. The shoutbox includes some built in spam protection and to date has stopped 1306 spam bots from posting spam to the shoutbox.
I don’t know why the spam bots are after me, I cant be that popular a site. The situation is even much worse for high traffic site, where the spam comments each day can number in the ten thousands. I shall continue the fight against spam.
Those spam numbers are huge! Thank goodness you have those tools in place.
Great site–I love it.
~Anne
Steve,
What I find interesting is the differences between your site and mine. Bad behavior has done nothing for me, while the soutbox has been most effective. Here are my stats:
Shoutbox – 9,502 spams blocked (and a few still leak through every month)
Askimet – 496 spams blocked
Bad Behavior – 0 (makes me wonder if it is working!!)
Wow, Paul, that is a stark difference… I would try deleting the plugin and reinstalling… Bad Behavior is saving me bandwidth too… quite a drop…
I don’t get any attacts. Guess I’m just not worth the trouble.
maybe old retired guys are exempt.
Are these blockers free?
Where do I find them?
My third genealogy class was again very enjoyable. I have two more classes, next Mon. and Wed.
When I’m finished I’ll send you a list if all the sites we have learned about. Sure you know about most of them. Fun doing the cross checking. Find a little tidbit here, then go to another site and find a tidbit more, etc.
On Google I found the transcript of a court martial in 1950 where my Dad was a member of the jury. Read Col. Pechuls response to questions from the prosecuter. Amazing stuff!
Tell Sean I’m very proud of him for winning the spellig bee again!!!!!!!! And also Savannah for lasting till the third round !!!
Brett, what do you have to get attacked by spam bots? Its not a PC they attack (though there are forms of those too like spyware), but websites. Do you a have a website we dont know about? 😛
I think I saw that trial too… Kid say thanks…