Spam Protection w/ captchas and still under attack

[sasha]

We've been under attack all day and I had to do the emergency comment shut down because I'm getting dozens of e-mails per hour as we have forced moderation for comments set to 0.

Captchas are set at 0 and I thought that would have helped decrease the auto spam. Is there anything else we can do? Should we be setting some other option to prevent automatic spam?

How would the auto spam get through to the moderation if I have captchas set?

[garvinhicking]

It seems that you might not be getting comment spam, but in fact trackback spam!

What do your emails look like? It might help to set auto-moderation for API-generated comments to true. And of course it might help to enable URL-filters or author-filters and insert the ones of the current spam attack.

Trackback spam does not get Captchas applied, because this is technically not possible - trackbacks are not entered via human input.

Regards,
Garvin

[sasha]

Thanks so much for the helpful reply. Maybe they are trackbacks.

Would you suggest "moderate" or "reject" for the auto-moderation for API-generated comments.

The e-mails start off like this:

A new comment has been posted on your blog "blog name", to the entry entitled "entry name".
Link to entry: "link name.html"

Requires review: Yes (Spam Prevention: Invalid message.)
User IP-address: "ip address"
User Name:
User Email:
User Homepage:

Comments:
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It seems that you might not be getting comment spam, but in fact trackback spam!

What do your emails look like? It might help to set auto-moderation for API-generated comments to true. And of course it might help to enable URL-filters or author-filters and insert the ones of the current spam attack.

Trackback spam does not get Captchas applied, because this is technically not possible - trackbacks are not entered via human input.

Regards,
Garvin

[garvinhicking]

Okay, you are getting those messages because in the spamblock configuration you set to set spam to "moderate", which is why you get all the mails.

You could set it to "reject" to not get those mails. Remember though that then you never get notified of Spam-comments and you can only look them up in your s9y comment moderation panel.

Regards,
Garvin

[sasha]

In the spam protector screen I see an option to "reject" or "moderate" or "no" to API but nothing for "moderate" all comments in the sapm protector. Also, we do want to moderate incoming comments we just want to block all this junk spam.

The trouble is if we have to look in the comment modderation panel (as we do now) it become overwhelming and time consuming to moderate valid comments among 100s or thousands of spam comments. Is there a way to easily block spam comments and block trackbacks as well? Thanks again for all your help!

Okay, you are getting those messages because in the spamblock configuration you set to set spam to "moderate", which is why you get all the mails.

You could set it to "reject" to not get those mails. Remember though that then you never get notified of Spam-comments and you can only look them up in your s9y comment moderation panel.

Regards,
Garvin

[jenniferb]

Dear Garvin
I have a query re: spam prevention, is there an accessible option available on Serendpity for CAPTCHA that will offer an audio/sound option?

We have just started using Serendipity and I am not fully familiar with all of the options.

Thanks Garvin

Regards
Jennifer

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Dear Garvin
I have a query re: spam prevention, is there an accessible option available on Serendpity for CAPTCHA that will offer an audio/sound option?

I don't think so; the recaptcha project AFAIK also only has a text captcha.

At least, I am not aware of such a solution. Audio/Sound is quite complex to create artificially.

Regards,
Garvin

[Don Chambers]

I think recaptcha DOES have an audio option, but I do not know if it is multi-lingual, and the last time I checked into it, the words were VERY difficult to understand.

[jenniferb]

Dear Garvin and Don

Thank you for your replies, I had a listen to the audio on the reCAPTCHA site and agree it is very difficult to understand, which is a shame, there are a lot of good Text to Speech engines out there now. One that has very good results is a program called TextAloud from NextUp.com http://www.nextuptech.com/

Their natural voices are very good, as well as offering multilingual options. The program itself is terrific for turning text to audio, I wonder if something like this would be able to be used to produce the audio...

Anyway, thanks for the replies at least there is something out there already, maybe it can be improved....

Regards
Jennifer

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

But Textaloud seems to be a client program, not something that runs on a server and can be interfaced with PHP...

Regards,
Garvin