Spam in 2018

When I published my blog with the shiny new format this morning, SPAM started flowing in IMMEDIATELY. Less than 10 minutes after I published, the first “Viagra” message was added as a comment.

And then it flowed in, in a steady pour, approximately one spam message every 45 minutes.

My old blog used Akismet to filter out the worst spam. Unfortunately Akismet does not work well with Staticman yet, instead I decided to try ReCaptcha.

Pretty easy to implement, the hardest part was finding the documentation that tied Staticman and ReCaptcha together.

This is where I found it in the end: https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman-recaptcha

I knew spam would come, but not at that rate. I naively hoped that in 2018 the bad guys would have found more profitable areas of revenue than spamming blog comments. Turned out not to be the case.

I hope that ReCaptcha will effectively stop it.

Update Nov 4, 2018: Recaptcha was only partially effective and stopped about two thirds of the spam. When I added a honeypot to the mix spam was finally eliminated.