Attempt at Reducing Spam Comments

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been hit pretty hard with spam comments (wow-gold anyone?). Although BlogCFC makes them really easy to weed out (thanks Ray!), I can't help but feel bad when I realize that some of my readers who've subscribed to comments on posts get spammed by these as well.

A couple of months ago, I read about a neat little utility called CFFormProtect. Written by Jake Munson,

CFFormProtect is a fully accessible, invisible to users form protection system to stop spam bots, and even human spammers.

One of the best features, in my opinion, is that it doesn't rely on having the user enter anything special to recognize if it's spam or not (no more CAPTCHA!). In the background, though, it uses a series of tests to determine whether the comment is valid. Convinced, I finally decided today to give it a try. Sitting down in front of my computer, I figured it'd be best if I first googled BlogCFC and CFFormProtect, see if anyone had any issues installing one with the other. To my surprise, one of the first posts I read was the announcement that the latest version of BlogCFC (5.9.3) actually included CFFormProtect!

In my case, though, I was still running 5.9.1, so I had to update to get it working. This is really easy to do, but there are steps you want to make sure you don't miss. Start by downloading the most recent version of BlogCFC from RIAForge. In org/camden/blog/blog.ini.cfm, change the line usecfp=no to usecfp=yes. You can also decide to remove CAPTCHA (usecaptcha=no). Make sure you also update the other keys to match what you have on your live blog (namely dsn, username, password, owneremail, blogURL, blogTitle and blogDescription).

Once that is done, you might want to copy your styles over from your existing install. In my case, I had to copy over my layout.css and style.css files, from the includes folder, and tags/layout.cfm. Once that was done, it was just a question of uploading the client and org folder to the host, overwriting the existing files and refreshing the blog cache (in admin, click on "Refresh Blog Cache"). This ensures the application scope is refreshed to take in the change components and tags.

And that is it! Hopefully this will make a difference in our fight against spam. Eventually I might try out the interaction with Akismet (further reduces spam), but for now let's see how it goes.