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A Quick Comment Spam Avoidance Technique for ExpressionEngine

I’ve been noticing some slightly strange search engine keywords used to find this website in my Google Analytics account. People are reaching my website by searching for things like “please enter the word you see in the image below”, “remember my personal information”, and “notify me of follow-up comments”.

These searches come from bots using Google to look for pages with comment forms on them in order to leave comment spam. Phrases like “notify me of follow-up comments” are likely to be on a comment page, particularly because that exact phrase is part of ExpressionEngine’s documentation for the Comment Entry tag.

So - and you should note that I haven’t (yet) done this myself - a simple way to cut down on random spam comments would be to change the wording on your comment pages. Make it be something just as easy to understand, but just don’t echo the generic EE-specific wording used in the documentation.

EDIT 9/17/09:

I made the comment form changes when I got a spam comment on an entry I had posted just half an hour ago. Checking my server’s logs, I found that he found my site by searching for

family “remember my personal information” “notify me of follow-up comments”

My site was on the top page of results.

EDIT 2/17/2010:

I’ve actually decided to disable comments on this particular weblog entry, because it has all the keywords for spammers.


Posted on Jul 01, 2009 - 06:20 PM

Comments:

Of you could just cheat and use an image.
I’ve done that before. Same for email addresses if they must be shared smile

Neat tip Luke!

By OrganizedFellow on Aug 07, 2009 - 12:30 AM

Comments:

Yeah….to me also, changing the wording on the comment pages can prevent spamming…..

By cufflink on Sep 12, 2009 - 11:11 PM

Comments:

There is a script to encode the text using javascript - I have used it for emails aswel before .. only problem is that if the person has disabled javascript it onviously doesnt show up raspberry could work tho!?

By Web Design Norwich on Feb 15, 2010 - 02:02 PM

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.