After purging a bunch of spam comments I’ve upped the ante in the war on terror spam.
It really doesn’t matter how many spam plugins I use, or whatever extraordinary efforts I go to, spam always seems to find a way through the defenses. A combination of black-list, keyword filter, Akismet and Spam Karma 2 is currently insufficient iron against comment spam..
Thus, I have enabled a little-documented feature in Wordpress that forces all comments via a routine that compares the commenter, against previous known comments.
For most, it will mean business as usual - no hinderences to leaving your thoughts aboard the smackfoo rollercoaster, as many of you are regular vistors1.
If you, my dear reader, are a “long time reader, first time commenter” then please know that your comment will be safe-and-sound in the moderation queue - as soon as I clear it, you’ll be good to go2 in future.
This simple act of taking a chainsaw to the collective knee’s of the spamming community3 will stop all comment spam, dead.
This has two benefits - one, I can leave akismet on to catch any sneaky malformed comment posting and two, the delay in posting your comment will be shorted considerably as 4000 different “potential spam checks” will be skipped.
Thank you, come again.
- .. it amazes me so many of you keep coming back.. :) (↩)
- .. within reason, of course. (↩)
- .. colourful terms swirl as I seek to find less offensive terms that don’t include fuck-knucke, wanker, mouth-breather and such.. (↩)
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of spam, updates, wordpress.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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