Spam comment tale continues
Things are getting worse at the spam comment front, whereas I used to get about 2 to 3 spam comments a day (or comments that look very real but advertise a commercial website nevertheless), I now have attracted more people that leave unwanted comments. Up to 20 a day, worse than my mailbox *with* spamfilter.
This is bad...
80% of those comments are added to a single article which alarmed me, investigating this a bit I found the following sites in my top referrer list. This digitalpoint.com forum seems to be used for advertising high PageRank sites so people can spam and advertise their own sites.
So Mollom is of no use, a difficult CAPTCHA is of no use, I really do not know what to do. To make it easier to find real comment spam I am probably going to disable the URL-text field so that saves me one step (checking of the URL is commercial) because 20% of the spam comments actually offer quality content and look very serious.
Another problem with comment moderation is the fact that it requires a lot of mouse-clicks and page rendering just to mark a comment spam and send it to Mollom. (20 times a day) It could be easier if I could mail the content of comments to myself, that way I do not have to open the comment, read it. On top of that, mailing it to me could be useful to have my mail spam-filter have a go at it.
At days it feels as if I am fighting a lone battle against the Internet. And I think I am loosing it.
Update: Thanks everyone for giving me clue about the rel="nofollow" attribute. I obviously stopped tracking Web development before such a thing existed (and was exploited).
Today I looked into Drupal 6's capabilities for adding such attributes and I stumbled across the line 1567 in includes/theme.inc and discovered a bug:
<br>$output = l($object->name, $object->homepage, array('rel' => 'nofollow'));<br>
should become
<br>$output = l($object->name, $object->homepage, array('attributes' => array('rel' => 'nofollow')));<br>
for the existing functionality to acually work. This will set rel="nofollow" for all homepage links contributed by unverified users. I forwarded this fix to Dries Buytaert who was also concerned with my high rate of comment-spam :)
Update 2: http://drupal.org/node/258120