But I don’t like spam!

I feel so bad for my poor students who have eagerly awaited comments from the world at large, and have finally gotten them, only to find out that the world wants them to be taking drugs and looking nakid pictures while playing texas holdem. Heck, I feel bad for me deleting dozens of emails telling me about all the spam waiting for my approval. To WordPress’s credit, blacklisting the spam does seem to make it unlikely that it will show up on the blog. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone anticipated the floods of bot-generated spam that would result.

I thought changing the name of the comment handler would cut the spam down to a trickle. Nope. And blocking IP ranges doesn’t seem to help much either. Which leaves me with a captcha-like system, similar to the one I had on my last MT blog. I’m not happy with this solution, but I do think it’s likely to work. If you want to use it on your own system, the hack is called AuthImage. Assuming it goes without problems over the next week or so, I’ll probably install it on the blogserver as well.

Alternatively, I may require folks to login before posting. Yes, it’s a pain, but maybe some of the pain would be helped by sxip or the like…

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One Comment

  1. Posted 10/29/2004 at 10:39 am | Permalink

    Your solution should work well. I’m currently using the WPBlacklist plugin for WordPress. It filters spam by known spammer IPs, URLs and by regular expression of common spam words. It even scans old comments for spam. The only down side is that I have to turn my comment email off as I would get a ton of reports on spam being deleted.

    WPBlacklist261.zip

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