Comment spam, as I’ve found today, can be a real problem for blogs. I take a very strict attitude, I will never allow my blog to be hijacked in this way, and will manually delete every single piece of scum if I have to.

My first response this afternoon was to do just that, until I realised the attacks wouldn’t stop anytime soon. So next, I tried blocking specific IP addresses, first for posting comments, then for the whole site. This failed, because of the huge amount of addresses used by the enemy.

Next, I moved on to Comment Control, a Nucleus plugin. This solved the main problem, as every single comment now had to be moderated by me. The spammers have been defeated, but at the cost of a lot of my time.

So the next plugin in this arms race became the Pivot Blacklist. Spam linking to a huge list of addresses will now be blocked automatically, making things a lot easier. And anyone caught spamming will be redirected to a special page where I can laugh at beating them.

The final step will be to add a Captcha image for verification before posting, which I’ll add if the bots return (they seem to have stopped for now.) This should stop the robots from even being able to post.

So there you have it, layers of security built up to stop comment spammers dead in their tracks. I’m hugely in debt to all the wonderful bloggers who develop and maintain these anti-spam systems, and I hope this post is a helpful guide to anyone in a similar situation. Please fight comment spam, every link you allow in your blog is another boost to their Google PageRank and another incentive to continue. Together we will win!

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