A little over a month ago I released the first version of my anit-spam plugin called Fun with Random Comment Forms. Since then I have been doing a lot of work to find bugs and add useful features, and I am thinking of adding some statistics into the mix. The question is, what statistics to add?

What I want to know from you is what would be the most important things you could know about the spam on your blog?

The version that is live out there right now only captures the total number of automated comments that have been prevented. I didn’t find that particularly useful so I started adding more.

The current test version logs the number each day and reports it back, on the graph below. It also captures the same data for Akismet to provide a comparison between automated spam and person-entered comment spam. (I only added this yesterday so it doesn’t currently have any data)

I have some ideas but I really want to hear yours. What do you want to know about the spam that hits your blog?

[spam_chart]

Do-follow or no-follow? is it important which you choose, as long as you are open about it? I’ve made changes to this blog that are more extreme than either choice in the hope that it will help with the debate.

What have I done? I have removed the links from commenters’ names altogether.

You read that right. Comment here in the near future and you are guaranteed to get no link love at all.

The URLs are not gone, they are just displayed in plain text now so you can copy and paste to visit the commenter’s blog if you want to.

Am I mental? Perhaps. I want to see what happens, nothing more.

Will it stay this way forever? Probably not, that really depends on the response. That’s the point.

There is a poll (if you don’t want to comment) and and open comment thread on the comment policy page. Let me know what you think.

Lots of people are talking about turning off Akismet for a day to see how much work it actually does. I think that’s mental!

I am inclined to think that it would be better to use an altered version with some kind of logging function so you get the stats without having to spend 24-36 hours de-spamming your comments.

I am considering it though, but for a different reason.

I am quite interested in preventing the spam in the first place, rather than dealing with it once it arrives, and so have been experimenting with ideas for a little while. I am running something experimental at the moment just to see what effect it has. Turning off Akismet would give me a greater challenge, but I’m slightly scared in case it goes wrong.

One thing I have found is that it is particularly difficult to intercept spam before it gets processed by WordPress. For my current experiment I needed to be able to alter the Post variables before they were used by WordPress. I have actually had to change some of the core files to allow this as the only way to deal with it totally via a plugin is to let the comment happen, and then roll it back with it after the fact.

That seems slightly odd to me, so perhaps I have missed something.

Since I started this blog I have been getting trackbacks from dubious sources, blogs that are clearly ripping off my content. I have also had trackbacks from blogs ripping off the content of other blogs that linked to me. Lorelle has written about these new kinds of spammers, it is clearly a problem.

One of the solutions pointed to is ©Feed plugin.

The plugin allows you to add a message to the end of your feeds, that don’t appear on your site. A digital fingerprint the readme file calls it. The idea being that it makes it easy to track, and therefore deal with the sites that are using your work for their benefit.

It also promises to scan some search engines for the fingerprint code to give you feedback.

I intend to try this out for a little while and see what results that brings me. I will report back.

In the meatime I would be interested to hear whether you have used it and what your impressions of it are.