Wordpress must have arrived
Perhaps a sign of gaining acceptance of a blog app is when it starts getting comment spam. I got my first today. Yippie? Fortunately, wordpress has a feature to throw a comment to moderation if it contains more than x number of links.
Now if the bozos give me any more trouble, I’m whitelisting via email address.
20. July 2004 at 12:07
I installed Wordpress a few months ago and already I average about 1-2 “potential” spams a week. Luckily I’ve installed an optional comment moderator plug-in, which automatically moderates any comment for a post that is 7 days old.
Works well.
20. July 2004 at 12:16
I’d stuck some whitelist code in check_comments() (I used to rant about this on #wordpress) on my dev site. I should probably move it over to production.
The idea is rather simple, you force every new email address through moderation the first time. Once it passes, you allow it past (of course, still run spamwords and link count checks). As long as it wasn’t used by many people, it would work great. Only problem is, if it ever caught on the bots could just scrape the pages of commentors from the site, backtrack and scrape urls, then come back and post using their email.
Oh well, thank goodness it’s pretty easy to modify the check behavior to your liking.
How many hits on average do you think you take on the 7 day limit now? I should probably start implementing the checks I want to now, rather than later.
21. July 2004 at 19:20
Same amount as before. It’s just they (as in the spammers) don’t realize it’s there, until they notice that the comment itself isn’t automatically posted.
The best one I received as of late was the spam from Mexico offering me free DVDs. The kicker was the titles of these “so-called” free videos, titles like “Star Wores”, “Thelma and Louis”, “Bravehurt”. It was hilarious, to the point where I almost let it through for the stupidity of it.