Just wanted to do a quick post about the new spam system I am using: Spam Karma 2. It’s been a while since I looked around at spam plugins, but it was getting pretty bad for a while, and since I haven’t had much time to work on the blog dev stuff that I want to, I decided to try out this one that I had seen recommended in various places.
I’m still tweaking the settings and working everything out, but it seems pretty good right now, and it is catching 100% of the spam at the moment (which the WPBlacklist plugin I was using before was obviously missing). Spam Karma has a lot of interesting details about it which I’ll perhaps expand upon later, but what I like about it most is that it combines mulitple strategies for detecting whether a particular comment is spam, and assigns “karma” points (positive or negative) to a given comment depending on how it fares against all the different filters.
One of the many options it’s using is doing something like I was doing with my original spam plugin that I wrote myself: putting encrypted data in the form that is then checked on the server when the comment is posted, to verify that it was posted from the form that the user just loaded. Obviously they do this differently than I did, so my tagboard was not compatible with this approach, and this is why all the tags were getting moderated after I turned it back on. Until I fix it, I’m just going to leave the tagboard disabled (I never really liked tagboards too much anyway).
Another interesting aspect of it is that Dan tried to submit several tags which were getting blocked because of the issue mentioned above, but then after a number of failed comment attempts (by the same person/IP within a given window of time) it automatically added his IP and his domain (from the URL field) to the blacklist, so that even when he tried to comment in a normal post he couldn’t. I thought that was pretty cool.
One Comment
you’re right, any filter that blocks dan posts is pretty cool.