When I set up my students’ blogs I configured them to send me an email whenever a comment was posted. That turned out to be a handy function. To begin with, I didn’t realize how much kids would use the comment feature. Some of them went comment-crazy. I had several teachable moments regarding how to comment. None of the comments they made seemed especially deep, but they served to let the author know that their work had been read.

The other day one of the kids’ blogs got a comment from someone asking for advice about doing flips and requested the student email back. Woah! It wasn’t a spambot. Maybe it was a person the kid knew…but I wasn’t sure. One major red flag was that a web url was listed that was for a government site in the UK. I realized that the kids - no longer my students, and with no access to the blog admin panel this summer - are nonetheless vulnerable to predators who may try to contact them through the comments. Sooo…I found a place in feedback.php where I could add a conditional that requires a commenter to be logged in to post a comment. Since nobody but me can log in during summer vacation, no more comments. This was an easy hack. B2evolution hasn’t gotten the spam traffic that Borderland has. B2evo uses a list of spammers that are kept on a central server. It must work good, because we haven’t seen any drug, gambling, or sex spam with the student blogs.

Borderland gets tons of comments. Mostly drugs and gambling spam. Lately there have been shitloads of spam flooding my comments. The WordPress comment spam filters, when running on a not-too restrictive setting, didn’t really stop the spammers. Opening the blog up was like going into my shed to see how much squirrel damage there has been lately. The squirrels leave mushrooms, nesting material, and squirrel shit all over the shed. Cleaning it out is gross. I feel the same about comment spam. So I went looking for a new plugin that would knock the spam down before it got to me.

What I found seems to be working. From the WordPress forums, I found Spam Karma 2. It’s a series of filters that rates the comments on various levels. The filter evaluates something it calls karma points, and responds by either allowing the comment to pass unchallenged, putting it in moderation, presenting the commenter with a captcha, deleting the comment, or blacklistiing the commenter’s domain. It’s working great. But now, instead of going into the site to delete comments, I go to the site to see the SK2 logs and marvel at how many comments I didn’t have to delete myself. I don’t know if I’ve gained anything because I’m still spending time paying attention to comment spam. Just a different kind of attention.

Spamming comments is no different than trespassing as far as I’m concerned. I am especially outraged that anyone would try to take advantage of a child. But whether it’s a human predator or a programmer dumping spam all over the net to increase a page ranking, it amounts to predation all the same. Intent is the difference between criminality and bad manners. I had the thought that I could pose as a kid and respond to the email to see what happened. That may have been interesting, but who wants to wallow in squirrel shit?

SK2 has blocked hundreds of spam attempts in the last week. It’s amazing how many. They’re all logged. It’s like keeping a guard dog that spends the whole day chasing off solicitors. I noticed that there haven’t been any attempts for about 2 days now. But I decided to try an experiment. So I reactivated the Bad Behavior plugin to see if it would intercept the spam before SK2 had a chance. I realize that I may be asking for trouble by having too much filtering going on. But I’m curious. Besides, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Anything is better than wading through squirrel shit. If one guard dog is good, two might be even better.

If I only get comments from spammers, maybe I should just shut the comments off, anyway. What do I lose? At this point, I would lose a new form of idle entertainment swatting swarms of comment spam.