I really hate intensedebate right now
For those who happen to have a blog (and who doesn’t these days?) you are probably aware of intensedebate. It’s basically a system of threaded comments that you can plug into your site and take advantage of… well, now that I look back after uninstalling it I really don’t see an advantage, but I’m sure there are some.
In any case, one of the things I was hopping for – when I installed it as a plugin for wordpress here on Sugus – was that it would allow me to have open comments (i.e. no captcha) but still protect me from spam. I mean, they do deal with a lot of comments, so they are probably good against spam also, right?. Not really. This morning I checked my comments area and found 120+ spam comments, most in Russian. I am an international kind of guy but I’m pretty sure I don’t know that many Russian speaking people.
Also, for the past month, I have been getting a lot of these spam comments to moderate. It seems that no matter how many I mark as spam there will always be new ones (again, Russian mostly).
But I digress, so my point is: If you are going to make a system to manage comments, make damn sure you figure out clever ways of dealing with spam or no one will ever use them. At least, to be a little constructive here, give the proper tools to the site owners who will moderate the comments, like allowing certain domains from posting comments (for instance, I noticed a lot of these comments came from different accounts at the same Russian email domain).
And this is just my small blog, I can only imagine what bigger blog owners go through. Maybe they don’t use intense debate and rely on captcha like I will once again…
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Categorised as: blogging, complaints, computers
Glad you managed to get it sorted. Maybe I can remove Spam Free now. It seems silly to have 2 plugins for the same job!
I had exactly the same problem with intensedebate as you had! The instant I installed it I was flooded with spam. This went on for a couple of months, but I backed up Akismet with another spam plugin. I’m not sure if that causes any conflict. I’m certainly not aware of any, but I have next to no spam now. I installed WP Spam Free. I notified intensedebate about this problem, and what I did to rectify it, but I don’t know whether they’ve done anything about it.
I’m using plain Akismet now, and all spam is being caught. Super sweet
Hi Pedro. Sorry to hear about the spam issue. We’re currently working with our colleagues at Automattic to beef-up our Akismet integration. We’ll be rolling this out in the near future. Hope to see you back!
I’m glad you guys are aware of the problem and working on it
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I use disqus for my blog comments. Just add a small javascript tag and you’re done. It gives you a lot of options (i only use the basic system), login via twitter, facebook, openid, you name it.
And i really like the moderate/admin features. Although I don’t get spam (even without captcha), I have some trolls that try to ruin my blog, and I can block them via IP, or username, or email or whatever.
I really recommend it!
Good to hear you had a better experience than me