I catch comment spam for this blog via a wonderful plug-in called “Spam Karma 2“. It rocks. I have only had it let two by in all the time I’ve used it.
It works by setting up a bunch of criteria such as did the commenter/author put in a URL, how many URLs are in the comment itself, how old is the post, when was the last comment to the post, have they been caught (spanked) before, etc etc etc. It then gives the comment a score and based on that score, it puts the comment somewhere. All comments that are caught, I can then either “recover” them or send it through again, giving it a higher score. Each time I send it through, it gets spanked because it was through before so it builds up. I usually delete the comment (but not the score) after I’ve bumped it up to -1000 or more. (the lower the number, the more of a spanking it got)
I have my comment severity set to “Total Beeatch” which is as high as one can go. As a result, many legitimate comments get hung up until I recover them. Poor Sophia gets caught a lot. (I think it knows she is only making a comment to smart off or something.)
At any rate, I tell you this so that you understand what has happened. I have had some comments get a high score before of like, -2000 or more on its first go through. Mostly because the idiot has done this before. A few minutes ago I to see if any fish had got hung in the net. Yep, one new one. It has a score of, get this, -244555. 😮 I checked the comment to see why. The comment consisted of a crap load of links. As in, they go on forever. As in, 1217 URLs!! Holy Spam!
I had already followed your lead on Spam Karma 2. Seems it would be a minor tweak or plug-in to WP to be able to globally disallow comments after some user selected period, like 37 days, or whatever. Most of the comment spam I have seen is all targeted at posts that are 3, 4, even 6 months old. Like those are getting read by folks who are out looking for a source for their medz… Duh…
There’s an option for SK2 for “Post Age and Activity”. You can specify the time.
What I wish were different about SK2 is the scoring under the blacklist tab. It can give a comment a score of -2400 but on the black list, the IP address has a score of 90. I change all of them to -350 but the next time that address is run through, it changes it back up again. I don’t understand how all that works though. I’m just thrilled it catches them all. ya know?
Finally got bored enough to find time to install SK2 this morning. Other than the severity level you pump up to “Total Beeatch”, do make any other tweaks to the default settings? I just left them all there until I see how it works and get familiar with the point system, etc….
In order as they go down the settings screen, advance mode:
normal
normal
strong 3, 13 (not sure why)
Supastrong -2, 100
Supastrong
Supastrong
Supastrong
Strong
Supastrong 1, 2, 3, 5
Supastrong 7, 15
Supastrong (the box is checked and I left everything alone)
Enabled 15, 5, 5
And yes, I like to kick comment spam in the ass.