Oct 28
A bit of admin
Posted on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Al in Uncategorized
Hi all, just to let you know that I’ve tinkered a bit with the comments – we’ve been getting a frankly ridiculous amount of spam comments (usually 50+ per day) so rather than have to manually come in and spam or approve each comment that gets posted, I’ve installed a new plugin which will mean two things:
1) Your comments will no longer be held in a moderation queue if you’re a first-time commenter.
2) You’ll have to type in a little CAPTCHA thing each time you want to post a comment. Sorry that this has to be done – it’s just to try to weed out bots.
We’ll see how it gets on with cutting down the spam – if it succeeds, great, and we’ll keep it. If not, then we’ll try something else.
This is WordPress, right? CAPTCHA won’t help much. I recommend that you install the Spam Karma plugin, which tends to catch up most things by itself and has an extensive configuration panel to tweak the freak cases. Also, it doesn’t annoy users with CAPTCHAs.
Have you activated Akismet? I thought it was included in WordPress as an option by default and seems to do wonderful things at keeping spam out, without the need for a CAPTCHA.
Right, I’ve turned on Akismet and turned off the CAPTCHA plugin (Ivo, the CAPTCHA thing I had turned on was a specifically WordPress-designed one, so I figured it would work with WP, but I’ll see how things go with Akismet for a couple of days).
Hi Al,
First of all: Let me say that although I host a fan site of a wholly different genre, I’m such a HUGE fan of you and Paul’s lovable rants – I mean:expert analyses – that probably won’t be able to live without it. So promise me you’ll never, ever go off line, nor succumb to evil spammers!
Right.
What I really wanted to say was that I am using WP + Akismet + NoSpamNX plugin. The latter is absolutely marvelously efficient – and no CAPTCHA is needed. My former workplace had a WP blog as well with, uhm, 1000 spam mails per week (and only Akismet to protect). I installed the NoSpamNX and voila – it wen’t down to about a handful a day, easily caught in the spam folder.
So now I use it for my private blogs as well and recommend it warmly.
Keep up the great postings+pods from HTA.
Chris
P.S. No, no – I am not an affiliate of whoever made this plugin. Just wanted to share the good news.
P.P.S Why is there no mutant with anti-spam powers? (Perhaps that would have been to unbelievable a power?)
What would be rrrreaallly nice would be the opportunity to get follow-up notifications from the comments…
Mark: It would, but I’ve dug around in all the menus and can’t find a way to set that up.
Chris: Thanks for the kind words! Akismet seems to be really helping at the moment but if it starts to slip I’ll definitely look into NoSpamNX.