Stopping spambots cold with Botblocker

Last Updated on November 24, 2018 by Dave Farquhar

I’ve been absolutely getting pounded lately with spam comments from spambots–to the tune of one spam comment per minute. That’s filling up and slowing down my database and consuming CPU resources that I want for human readers.

So I resorted to installing Botblocker. All I can report right now is that it seems to be working–no spam comments for several hours.

I can’t guarantee it will work forever, and I’ve got Akismet to hide whatever spam gets through, but so far my server seems less busy and more happy, which is good. Things had gotten so bad for a while that I was getting timeouts when trying to post, which is ridiculous.

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2 thoughts on “Stopping spambots cold with Botblocker

  • January 24, 2013 at 9:38 pm
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    That was a disappointment. It blocked spam famously, but blocked all comments when I tried to comment using IE9. Since I couldn’t get the plugin to work with IE9, I didn’t even bother testing other browsers. I had to disable the plugin.

    I like the idea of blocking spam better than processing it, so I’ll investigate further. But the problem definitely isn’t solved, unfortunately.

  • January 25, 2013 at 9:01 am
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    I ended up settling on the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. It uses Javascript to generate a checkbox on the client side, which most spambots won’t be able to check. The fancier plugins all failed to work on my installation.

    I know using Javascript will make some people unhappy, but it’s the least painful option I can find right now that actually solves part of the problem.

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