Deluge of SPAM
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Hi. My WordPress-based blog, Educational Technology and Change Journal (etcjournal.com), for the past week or so, has been experiencing a massive attack of spam. I check in at about 8-hour cycles and find that they number in the hundreds. I delete them en masse, but I find just as many in my next check-in. My guess is that I’m receiving over a thousand a day at this point. Is there any way to reduce this deluge?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Are these spam comments being flagged as spam already (i.e. present in your spam comments section?). If so, then you don’t need to delete them yourself, in fact WordPress will automatically delete them after a few weeks. If they are being flagged as spam already, then there’s nothing you have to do, Akismet is doing it’s job. All blogs get hundreds, up to thousands of spam comments daily, and if they’re in the spam section, that’s where they should be, so you don’t need to do anything.
If they are getting through to your pending comments section then you should NOT DELETE THEM, instead mark them as spam. Akismet learns from these reports, so will help reduce the spam getting through to your pending comments.
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Hi, Daniel. Thanks for your helpful and reassuring reply! Yes, they’re being flagged as spam. I didn’t know that the spam queue automatically emptied after a certain amount of time. After years of no more than about 200 per day, the sudden rise in the past week or so to 2-3000 was alarming. I used to take the time to qucikly scan them for legit comments but not anymore. Now it’s a matter of logging in 3-4 times a day just to empty the spam bin.
Can’t the spam filter be tweaked to “learn” to automatically block the bulk of thee spam so they don’t show up in our queues? I notice that there are many repetitive elements that could become signals for spam. -Jim
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You’re very welcome
Spam comes in waves usually, and they tend to target topical events, because those will usually mean more views, so more people will see the spam. Potentially something attracted them to you. But (hopefully) the deluge will decrease over time.
Apparently the filter already blocks out the very ‘worst’ of spam, and who knows how much that blocked amount adds up to. But the filter is pretty good, so there shouldn’t be too many innocent comments which creep through.
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