The spam is always greener on the other side… or something…
Mar 27th, 2008 by Peter
Yeah yeah, it was hard to come up with a headline… so what.
2 days ago this blog was spammed with 256 comments from the same IP. It was the usual stuff offering me easy access to online casinos, “medicine” sellers and you know the drill.
I have no idea how it happened. Usually ReCaptcha does a good job at keeping these at bay, but something went wrong. It took me 30 minutes to delete them all manually. Yup – it pissed me off. So even though I hope it was a temporary glitch in ReCaptcha, I felt I had to enable Akismet immediately again.
Hopefully I can turn this off again soon, when I have 30 minutes extra if it fails.
Take a look at the FAQ on this issue:
HELP, I’m still seeing comment spam
There are two common issues that make reCAPTCHA appear to be broken, but are actually not problems.
* Moderation emails: reCAPTCHA marks comments as spam, so if you get moderation emails when spam comments are sent, you will get moderation emails for all spam comments with reCAPTCHA. We highly recommend turning off moderation emails with reCAPTCHA.
* Trackbacks and Pingbacks: reCAPTCHA can’t do anything about pingbacks and trackbacks. You can disable pingbacks and trackbacks in Options | Discussion | Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).
Hey Ben,
Thanks for dropping by and thanks a lot for the info. Will immidiatly try your advice and disable Ping-/trackbacks.
When I got the spam messages, I didn’t get any emails however. Even though I have set up WP to mail me when ever a new comment appeared, and even though all comments somehow was accepted by WP/ReCaptcha. So it must have been trackbacks as you mentioned then.