I have been using AkoComment on my Joomla / Mambo Blog section and have allowed anybody to comment (as opposed to only allowing registered visitors to leave comments). This has opened the way for spam robots to be able to insert spam into comments and I have had to keep on deleting annoying comments about casinos and other alluring offers.
I finally had enough of it and did a search for preventing this type of Spam on Mambo or Joomla. (The nice thing about Wordpress is that it has a Spam word list. You can add words into your Spam list and any comments containing those words will not be added.)
The security option that I chose in the end for this Mambo site is the Security Images component, written by Walter Cedric.
With this component activated, the user has to enter a series of numbers and letters from an image before the comment will be accepted.
The component cannot work on its own but works with a modified version of AkoComment and AkoCommentbot. You can download the whole package from the Joomla forge, at this link: http://developer.joomla.org/sf/search/do/results/guid4223FAE901083CF745E6C218/Project
The other option for protection against spammers is to use hashcash in conjunction (or on its own) with security images. Hashcash ties up the spammer robots and forces them to use a lot of CPU. This makes it 'expensive' for them to submit spam. I haven't bothered with this yet, I will try Security Images first and see if it works.
If you already have AkoComments installed, it is better to rather overwrite the code on your server with FTP rather than installing the component, since you will overwrite any comments that you already have on your site.
I copied the code from my hard disk onto the server for AkoComment and AkoCommentbot (if you have an existing AkoComment installation, I recommend that you ONLY copy the following files:
- akocomment.php, to your main ako_comment component directory
- your relevant language files
- the /packs directory
- akocommentbot.php, to the mambots directory
- admin.akocomment.html.php, to the ako_comment component directory under administrator and
- admin.akocomment.php, also to the ako_comment component directory under administrator
Please note that if you copy the config.akocomment.php to the administrator directory you will overwrite any previous settings that you had.
I set up the security related settings in my akocomment settings and it seems to work. Will now monitor the results to see if I get any more annoying comments posted about dating or casinos!
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