Blogspam

Checking comments for spam is no fun. Blogspam.net provides a great service to check comments for spam and you can use it easily with Ruby and/or Rails apps.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'blogspam'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install blogspam

Basic usage of Blogspam is really easy:

response = Blogspam.check_spam({
  agent:   user_agent, # "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B405"
  comment: body, # "First comment!"
  email:   email, # "test@example.com"
  ip:      ip_address, # "127.0.0.1"
  name:    name, # "Test User"
  site:    site, # "https://example.com"
})

repsonse
# => {"result":"SPAM", "reason":"Posting links listed in surbl.org", "blocker":"20-ip.js", "version":"2.0"}
# => {"result":"OK", "version":"2.0"}

We also provide a Rails concern that you can include in your model. You'll need two columns is_spam and spam_reason on your model to store the results.

rails g migration AddSpamToComments is_spam:boolean spam_reason:string
rails db:migrate

After you've added the columns, you can include Blogspam in your model:

class Comment < ApplicationRecord
  include Blogspam::Concern

  def blogspam_args
    {
      agent:   user_agent,
      comment: body,
      email:   author_email,
      ip:      ip_address,
      name:    author_name,
      site:    "http://example.com",
    }
  end
end

Each comment will be updated after_create to check for spam.

You also have access to clean and spam scopes to filter out clean and spam comments.

Comment.clean # => only is_spam = false comments
Comment.spam # => only is_spam = true comments

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/excid3/blogspam. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Blogspam project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.