ChapterZero

This morning I logged in to find 79 brand spanking new spam comments in the moderation queue, so it looks like I’m going to have to buckle down and figure out how to handle this problem. It’s going to be nasty: dealing with .htaccess files, and anti-spamming plugins; unfortunately, most methods I’ve found can in specific, reproducible circumstances, block actual people from the site, or from commenting. This bothers me more than if it randomly blocked people— probably because it seems like if you know what the problem is, you should be able to solve it. Unfortunately, Internet programming is never that tidy; you could plug as many holes as popped up one day, and the next day you’d discover some strange pathological situation in which the code blocked the wrong people. I wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t such a pain, trying to delete spam by hand.

The best looking anti-spam method I’ve found so far is based on .htacess files, awstat, and the Referrer-Karma script, and can be used in other applications than WP.

Hmmm… it seems WP doesn’t delete the comments that you mark as spam from the moderation queue; it simply marks them in the database and doesn’t display them, maybe as a precursor for using them to generate anti-spam software or dbs. Now I know that, seems like I have some db cleaning to do. There’s even a plug-in for this.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Problems posting comments? (6/26/2005)
• Changes… going through changes (6/28/2007)
• Changes… going through changes, cont’d (7/12/2007)