SpamHound is born

[b2evo] (which is the blog software we use) comes complete with it's own antispam blacklist, which is basically a list of urls that have been reported as spammers by multiple blog users. Sounds great huh? ...... Well, it kind of is ...... right up to the moment where you want to include one of the "spam" urls in one of your posts ...... and you get called a spammer!!!!

The current antispam blacklist has about 4,400 spam urls listed, many of which have to be obsolete by now, and every hit on a page is checked against it. All comments left, by memebers and visitors alike, are checked against the same list. This all adds up to a lot of unneccesary overheads for the poor old server cpu.

With this in mind I decided to see how effective the blacklist is, and just how many of the urls are actually needed. So, I implemented a comment moderation system for visitors and the emptied the blacklist ....... After deleting several thousand (moderated) spam comments I decided that this wasn't the way forward! The bright side was, I had a shedload of spam comments that I could analyse for common trends.

At the start of March I decided that I was ready for round two, so once again I dropped all of the antispam urls in the blacklist, this time however, I had the SpamHound to protect the blogs. Any comments that the SpamHound munches are automatically added to a seperate table so that the data can be further analysed, and any that get through enter a comment moderation process.

To date the SpamHound has munched over 26,000 spam comments and less than a dozen have managed to get as far as the moderation process!

Keywords : [keys][SpamHound] [SpamStats][/keys]