Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
There are several ways to do it, but none are 100% effective. I'm using one of the better ones on my own blog which stops about 150-200 spams a day, but I still have to manually delete 2-6 per day.
I've had good success with the following...

1) It's probably not ideal for SWJ, but to reduce my "cyber footprint" for spam searchers, I set my robots.txt file to...

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
I still show up first in any Google search for "Schmedlap" (a common search term, I'm sure!). But, I don't think most people have much luck in searching my site for content (what little there is). Works for me because I don't need the site to generate revenue because my expenses are cheap.

2) My code is written by me. Being an amateur, it is surely convoluted. I have seen strings of literally hundreds of log files where spammers (most likely from foreign countries) clearly were not reading the instructions and couldn't figure out how to post their spam (hint: check the box that says "submit without previewing"!)

3) I only allow a few specific HTML tags. Surprisingly, even after I permitted the anchor tag, most of the spammers tried some other goofy syntax to link to their (DVDs/footwear/porn/malware/etc) and it merely posted as plain text (after they made several go arounds with my convoluted code). They were quickly discouraged and stopped after two spam posts.

Good point on the IP address. The two spam posts that got through were identical, but one was from China and the other from Argentina, so I'm guessing they were masking/impersonating IP addresses.

Thus far, I've had only two spam posts, but many hundreds of attempts. And that's without asking for anyone's email address or requiring anyone to register. I teh rulz!