Stopping anonymous spam comments

[Hans Bergsten]

We suddenly get roughly 50 spam comments per day on our Confluence documentation site where we allow anonymous comments. The comments consist of keywords (e.g. "coach purse store ...") plus a list of URLs. We have captcha enabled but it doesn't help. It also seems like the spam comes from multiple IP addresses so blocking on IP does not seem to be a solution.

Is there a plugin that can analyze comment text before it is saved and filter out spam? I've looked but cannot find anything.

If not, what is the URL for posting a comment? I've analyzed the access log but cannot figure out which URL corresponds to "save comment"? I would expect it to be a POST request, but nothing seems to match. If I knew the pattern for a "save comment" request I may be able to develop my own ServletFilter and handle this.

I would appreciate any hints because it's getting really time consuming to clean upp this mess every day.

Best Regards,
Hans

[Peter Van de Voorde]

Hi Hans,

Could this help you out? : https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Configuring+Captcha+for+Spam+Prevention

Best regards,

Peter

[Hans Bergsten]

Thanks for the pointer Florin. I have added my comment to the thread where Atlassian says they will not consider doing naything about this to show that there are others interested in this. I hope others do the same.

Peter, we have captcha enabled but it doesn't help. Please see the link Floring posted.

Thanks,
Hans

[Florin Manaila]

You can find a similar discussion here: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/251285/captcha-bypassaed

[Jeff Thomas]

Hi Hans,

Do you have Captcha turned on for your Confluence instance?