Spam-blocking stats for REALNEO

Submitted by Jeff Schuler on Tue, 02/10/2009 - 11:39.
Spam-blocking stats for REALNEO

Spam-blocking stats for REALNEO: Aug 30th, 2008 through Feb 10th, 2009. We've seen quite a leap in activity very recently.

We currently use Mollom (one of Dries' newer projects) to protect the following forms:

  • site-wide contact
  • user registration
  • user password request

All of the orange Spam attempts blocked you see in the image are attempts on those forms -- most likely, user registrations. You can barely see the green, which are non-spam attempts.

Mollom will also add filtering to the following forms as well:

  • comment
  • per-user contacts
  • blog entry
  • book page
  • event
  • forum topic
  • image
  • page
  • poll
  • story

We could expand filtering to content/comment posting, but this might raise the barrier to participation on the site, (as some forms would require a CAPTCHA,) and very quickly put us beyond the limitations of the free version of Mollom's service.

We could switch to a free module that provides CAPTCHA alone, (as opposed to Mollom's more active filtering,) but unless we do want CAPTCHAs on all forms, Mollom seems to be doing fine right now. I think some of the spam we've seen lately are actually human-driven anyway, which a CAPTCHA would not do much to prevent.

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Fascinating stats and trends... you seem to have it covered

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Tue, 02/10/2009 - 13:15.

Wow... what is causing those spikes? 

I thing your current configuration is best, and it seems to be doing a good job.

Captcha wouldn't have keep a fake human member from posting, which seems to be where we are actually having problems.

We need to define good member behavior and enforce that.

Good analysis, Jeff!

Disrupt IT