Preventing comment spam in Mango
My blog is still very new and has yet to recieve an authentic comment from a real reader, but there have been many attempts to post spam in the comments. Being new to the Mango blog engine, I researched my options to see what would be the best compromise between usability for the user and effectiviness at stopping comment spam. Looking through the Mango forum, I noticed that many people were using CFFormProtect as their spam protection instead of a captcha method. I was excited about this, as I really have a dislike for using captcha text as spam prevention since it is often so difficult to read the letters in order to be effective.
I enabled CFFormProtect in the Mango Blog administrator and waited to see how well it would perform. Almost immediately, comment spam started to arrive on my blog. I took a look at the options avaible for tuning CFFormProtect and made a few small adjustments to see if it would help, but I still would receive at least several spam comments an hour.
At this point, I decided that I would turn on the Lyla Captcha plugin until I had time to further look into how to make CFFormProtect do the job that I needed it to do. Once Lyla Captcha was enabled, I noticed that the actual images were not showing up in the comment form. At first I thought it might be the theme that I created was causing the problem, but after a little research on the issue and no luck finding the answer I decided to try CF8 Captchas which, did work right away after enabling it.
Like I said earlier, I really don't like the use of Captchas, so I went back to looking at CFFormProtect to see what I needed to do to make it effective at stopping comment spam. I decided to look at using Akismet Spam Detection Service, which required creating an account to obtain an API key that needs to be entered in the CFFormProtect options. I also set CFFormProtect to send me an email each time a comment is determined to be spam so I can see how well it is working. So far after adding the Akismet Spam Detection service all spam comment attempts have been successfuly blocked. Now, I'm still waiting for a real, legitimate, human comment on my blog...
Comments
CFFormProtect + Akismet + Project HoneyPot = No more Spam I've had that combination on my blog for a while and so far it has worked like a champ. It is a beautiful thing!
There is a standalone Akismet plugin for Mango Blog too. FYI - Checkout the Project HoneyPot also an option through formprotect's mango blog plugin. http://www.projecthoneypot.org/
@Steve - I could not agree more about using the Captcha method. It is not only an extra step but depending on how legible the characters are it can be several extra steps. @Steve and Mike - I will need to take a look at project honeypot further. Thanks for the tip!
I've used CFFormProtect successfully without turning on either Akismet or Project Honeypot. I 've had it working on 800 sites that generated tens of thousand spam attempts per day. The default settings just need to be tweaked. First thing is to limit the number of URL's in a comment to one. Next start logging and it will show you exactly where you need to adjust the settings. If you do turn on Project Honeypot or Akismet this blog post shows you how: http://www.trajiklyhip.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/6/29/Adding-Akismet-and-Project-Honeypot-to-BlogCFC
Interesting write up. I've used CFFormProtect for a while now and it's caught every spam message that has come through my site. I have not activated Akismet yet though was thinking about it for the extra protection layer. I also went for CFFormProtect because I didn't want to have to use Captcha - the extra step when filling out forms always annoys me :) All the best with your solution.