Comment Spam Honeypot

22 December 2012 · Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

I have my own secret sauce for filtering out comment spam from my blog. I thought it would be interesting to let it all through on one post.

It’s been 4 years—almost to the day—since I first blogged about my solution to comment spam.

As my friend, Daniel, said in the first comment of that post, my blog was not notorious enough to warrant paid spammers (still isn’t, in fact), so really the enemy was, and still is, automated comment spam.

As of May 15, 2009, I had received 3,431 total comment submissions. 57 of those were legitimate comments. 3,374 were spam submissions. I’d had 18 false positives (spam messages that leaked through) and 1 false negative (legitimate comment that was flagged as spam).

As of today, 3½ years later, I have received 36,016 total comment submissions. 173 of those have been legitimate comments (thanks for those!). 35,843 have been spam submissions. I’ve had 24 false positives and 151 false negatives for a 99.995% success rate.

Again, this post will let through all manner of sturm und drang.

Let the spamming begin!

Update: I’ve turned off spam comments to this post and will follow up with a bit of analysis of my experiment soon!