The Spammers May Be Winning, Help Us With A Little Test

We love’ums, them’s spammers. Just the other day, we found out that spammers had figured out a way to bypass Hotmail’s captcha and were creating hundreds of dummy accounts every hour to send waves and waves of spam all over the InterTubes. Well, sure enough, within a few hours, we too were being showered.

On any given day, we receive around 2,500 spam attempts. We run Akismet, who manages to catch all but maybe 30 or 40 of them. Cleaning these up is part of the daily chores on OhGizmo. But suddenly, two days ago, over 300 of them made it past the filter. That’s unacceptable, so we added a second layer of protection: Spam Karma, a WordPress plugin.

Unfortunately, we’re not sure if now Spam Karma may be overdoing its job, and giving us false positives. So, help us tweak its settings by leaving a comment on this post. If, by morning (11am EST or so), there’s a bunch of comments here, then we’ll know that you people have just been a little quiet of late and the settings are fine. If there’s nothing, then we’ll tweak some more, and keep you updated. We’ve received a couple of complaints of comments not making it onto the site already, so that’s why we’re doing this.

Thanks guys.

Update: The comments you see here (the first 7 anyway) were recovered manually. Strangely though, they were caught by Akismet, and not Spam Karma. I’ve disabled Spam Karma anyway, as I suspect that it has something to do with this kerfuffle. We’ll see what happens over the next few hours. Again, thanks for all y’alls help.

Update #2: Getting rid of Spam Karma seems to have done the trick. Probably an interaction between Akismet and SK made things go down the pooper. Spam Karma is supposed to be good, but it’s resource intensive. Akismet isn’t… but it tends to fail, sometimes massively. I’m holding my breath that I won’t have to delete 300 messages a day, again.