Just Another Quick Spam Update…
After adding WP-SpamShield in late August and seeing that it didn’t let anything through in all this time, I have now decided to stick only to it and get rid of Akismet completely. Of course, the amount of spam received also dropped significantly, from that spike of over 1000 such comments per day when I made that change to low enough numbers that the listed average just dropped under 250 per day now, and this includes that first period. As such, just for personal future reference, I’ll just add that Akismet lists a total of 135335 spam comments blocked, to which a small number caught between the time of the last database backup before the old site vanished and me getting my own domain should be added.
But while I’m on this topic, it’s referrer spam that’s becoming quite annoying lately, since you actually need to handle that on a case by case basis and at this point I have three referrers I’m blocking from my site, two of which being added very recently. However, they seem to have gotten smarter now, actually spamming Google Analytics directly by adding the codes on their sites and therefore generating fake hits without ever visiting yours. Of course, there are ways to stop that as well, but this is getting quite ridiculous, don’t you think?
I guess that’s about it, and I do hope the post won’t attract even more of them. After the two long ones posted last week, this will have to do for now and then I’ll see what the second one for this week will be about, because the odds of actually putting together the two serious non-personal ones I keep saying I need to get around to are pretty much zero. But at least I seem to still be playing The Witcher, so I’ll probably get back to doing that right now.
