I was interested to see what WordPress did when I attempted to post a comment through a spam proxy – I didn’t know if the option under “Options->Discussion” to block posts from open proxys would catch it silently, or if it would be caught by and presented under the menu on “Options->SpamKarma”.
I did a “grep poker /var/log/httpd/access| tail -1” and grabbed the IP. A quick telnet showed that it was running an open http proxy server on port 80. So I set that as my proxy server, fired up Safari and attempted to comment on my last entry. SpamKarma got it and presented a warning to the comment poster that it was doing so, which meant that I could go to “Manage->Comments” and review it and delete it.
Ok, so it’s nice to know that when the spammers finally figure out where to spam my blog comments, SpamKarma will be on the case. It’s interesting to see that it’s not silently deleting spam now, which means that the spammers still have not figured out how to attempt to blog spam me. That’s just a little weird.
That is very strange – I’d expect them to have caught up by now.
Do you ping any sites when you post new entries? By default, under Options->Writing, WordPress is set to ping http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ every time you publish a new entry. This then updates various blog aggregators. I believe this is one of the places where the spammers find new URLs to spam.
Yes, I’m set up to ping rpc.pingomatic.com.
Interesting. I was gonna email you soon too, about this, as I have had some questions about comment spam on WP.
When I switched to WP, I was spam-free — using only the built in stuff with WP — for about 3 weeks. Then I got hit with a bunch spam, so I installed Spam Karma and since then I’ve received nothing. The thing is, I haven’t received any comments AT ALL since in stalling SK. So I was worried that maybe SK was being a little too aggressive. Then I read the article here: (http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2005/04/07/how-to-stop-spam/), and really started to wonder. But it sounds like you’ve tested SK pretty well and it seems to work as advertised.
Of course, you’re welcome to post a test comment or two to my site so I can watch SK in action for myself (your test method cited in your post is over my head, I’m afraid.)