As to SK giving me outs. There were a couple of times it mentioned the ability to enter a CAPTCHA or get an email to verify I was real, however, the site didn’t present me with the CAPTCHA or a way of telling it that I would like to use the email verification. I don’t use proxy’s, I understand what they are, but know of none to use. I really can’t imagine why I would be so high on SK’s bad side as to now give me an option to prove myself a valid commenter.

As for RK, I’ll have to check that out. I would prefer an automated system. The idea that RK will let people through if they “click” a link is a good idea. It is a pain to deal with planetOzh’s system adding new sites as they arrive. The thought of blocking legit surfers is worry some, but getting hundreds of referral spam hits was overriding that fear.

I’ll give RK a try tonight. Thanks for the heads up on how it works!

Well, as you can see, your comment made it fine through SK on this blog, so I’m glad to tell you that it isn’t some fundamental flaw or blacklisting (I have all default filters activated on my install, so as to be able to monitor it for myself). Doesn’t explain why you’d be kicked of everybody else’s blog though. But to know that, the only solution is to get one of the admin to look at his SK logs and check what is the reason given.

SK does gives a secondary way to prove that your comment is not spam, but only does that if your “karma” score isn’t too low to begin with. The only way to fall below this threshold is usually to show up as a spoofed IP (and that can happen if you are behind some sort of proxy server that caches pages and sends a different IP between the time you view the entry and post your comment) or trigger *many* different filters at once… Once again: only one way to find out…

Regarding ref spam, planetOzh’s script is indeed a simple and effective solution, but much different from RK. I recommend you read RK’s doc to see exactly what I mean, but the basic difference is that RK is mostly automated and doesn’t rely on a (very annoying to maintain and not very effective) list of keywords. Further more, while kicking spammers back to their own page might sound like fun, you need to remember that there’s always a potential for legitimate users to get that too, and we come to the exact same issue you are (rightfully) complaining about with SK
RK never kicks the user out. At most, it presents a “click here to view the page” redirection message…

As to my IP being on a blacklist somewhere. From what I saw when looking on Google for RBL’s, it would be a very time consuming task to try to track down which RBL has my IP if any of them do. Spamhaus didn’t. There is an email spammer using one of my domain names as the from address for their evil task. I’m not really happy about it, but there isn’t a whole lot I can do. At least they are not using the webhost’s server to send the spams.

As to the referral spam problem. You don’t have to preach about bandwidth waste there. My old domain was getting hit so bad, I was seeing up to 10GB’s of bandwidth a month on referral spam alone. Since I switched domains, I’m not seeing that much. I have been using http://www.planetOzh.com’s No Refer Spam. It’s a very small PHP file that basically redirects the http request back to the site attempting to leave the referral spam. Quite ingenious really. The referral spammer actually winds up refer spamming their site instead.

I would love to see that idea merged with a database and a list so that I could simply click on the referrals that I consider spam and not have to edit the PHP file each time I want to add entries.

I wish I knew enough about PHP to help with SK. It would be great if there was a way to drop to a secondary way of verifying if a comment is valid instead of just dropping the comment outright. :shrug:

Good luck with the projects and I hope you find some help with it.