Anon commenting off because of Spam so Register to post

We turned on anonymous commenting on articles about a year back after we added Mollum to the site,a Drupal module that checks content to see if its Spam or genuine.  For a good while the results were good but over the last few weeks Mollum has been losing the battle and the work of checking posts and deleting spam has become too much.  So until the situation improves anonymous commenting is once more off and you need to register to post.

We turned on anonymous commenting on articles about a year back after we added Mollum to the site,a Drupal module that checks content to see if its Spam or genuine.  For a good while the results were good but over the last few weeks Mollum has been losing the battle and the work of checking posts and deleting spam has become too much.  So until the situation improves anonymous commenting is once more off and you need to register to post.

Of course its not that simple either (boo hiss) as the Spammers also love settting up multiple user accounts.  Deleting these is also a pain in the ass so here is what we are going to do.

Once a week or so we are going to turn on the ability to create a new commenting account on the site.  When its on you will see a register link at the user login page. It will be turned on for a little over an hour at a time so if you want to know when to register you should Follow us on Twitter and / or Facebook.  (If Facebook then turn on notifications under the cog wheel when you LIKE the page to be sure of actually seeing when we post).  Registration will last as long as the site does so you only need to do this once.  

Apologies for the pain but believe me deleting dozens of spam messages a week was wearing me down.

One reply on “Anon commenting off because of Spam so Register to post”

 To be fair to Mollum.  When

 To be fair to Mollum.  When I checked the stats its been blocking about 1000 spam attempts per day on average and only allowing maybe 3-5 through so a failure rate below 1% but unfortunatly still too high for manual checking and deletion.

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