I run one forum about holidays in Scotland. It is a quiet little forum with just a few active members.
I’ve dealt daily with spam registrations from people wanting a link back to their spammy site, but recently I’ve found a new type of spam registration.

They are all innocent enough looking. The user sets up their registration normally – with no link to any website – and I think “great, a new user, maybe this site is going to start getting busier”. Then the user never posts anything once I have approved them.

So when I go back through the email addresses, I find that a large number of the people who I thought were legit are actually using email addresses @cashette.com

Until now I have been unaware of Cashette.com but on investigation it seems to be a place where you can set up an email address and if you happen to get any spam through on it, they will pay you some money. In theory, that’s great – you can get an email address where they virtually guarantee no spam, and if it does get through they pay you for it.

But then the dark side of the web hears about it and people try as hard as they can to get spam to their Cashette email address. Which means leaving their email address everywhere they possibly can in the hope that spam bots will get some spam through to them.

Luckily, once you know about it it is pretty easy to ban email addresses from a certain domain (well, it is in PHPBB) so I shouldn’t see any more of them now that I know about it.

These people must think they are being very clever, manipulating the system and all that. But honestly, it’s like leaving litter in the street. Stop it.

I decided the best comment spam protection for this installation of WordPress was Akismet. It’s dead easy to install and really looks like it will run in the background no bother at all. Now I can remove “Delete comment spam” from my list of things to do each morning. The one issue was that you have to sign up for a WordPress account on the WordPress site to get a code that unlocks the plugin, regardless of whether you run your blog on your own server. Not exactly a drama though.

Well the spam has finally got out of hand. Up to now I’ve been deleting a few spammy comments each morning but this morning I logged in to find 82 spam comments for various pharmaceuticals. I have no idea what these pills do or why they want a nofollow link from an SEO site but it must float their boat somehow. I know I’m being naiive and it’s all done using bots but I thought this comment particularly applicable:

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

It made me laugh.

Anyway the time has come to look into what spam plugins I can get for WordPress. I know Matt Cutts has a number verification one working on his site and I think that’s the way to go. There are a number of third party scripts and I’d just like to find the best one so that I don’t wake up to 82 comment alerts from this site alone in the morning.