Fighting spam with Waegis
Are you getting a lot of spam lately? BlogEngine has built-in filter and it worked just fine for me up until now. But for the last couple of months I got some spam getting through. Not a hole lot yet and sources seem to be pretty obvious so that I probably could’ve easily block it myself with simple home-made solution, but I decided to use it as an opportunity to take a look at big boy’s spam fighting machines.
There are few choices we have here, and first one I wanted to try is Waegis. Waegis is a service built by our fellows .NETers which supports many .NET projects including BlogEngine. It has entry level free personal subscription as well as commercial offering, which is usually a good sign – you have to have good hardware and solid back-end at a minimum to run commercial site and Waegis home page speaks up front about this important fact.
On the flip side – you have certain restrictions when you mix free and paid accounts. That’s fair, so before jumping in make sure your site gets less then 5000 monthly comments. I’m quite positive that this is not an issue for me. If you have several sites running under your domain, one account will cover up to 10 “instances” (if I got it right - in Waegis terms instance is not equals web application). I think these restrictions are pretty generous overall.
To get it up and running on BlogEngine, first go to http://waegis.com and sign up for free personal account. Then you can navigate to download section and get BlogEngine extension along with client library. It also comes with source code if you need to make changes and application key that extension will use to authenticate at Waegis. Simply put DLL in the /bin folder and extension in the /app_code/extensions, then enter your site URL and application key in the extension settings and you all set.
Now every time before accepting a comment, BlogEngine will call Waegis and kick it out if it decides that comment is a spam. How good it is in identifying spam? That’s the question! Time will tell.
