Spam fighting
February 28, 2007 | In Developer, WordPressOne of the daily rituals of owning one or more blogs is the clean up operation caused as a result of the constant bombardment by automated spamming bots. These automated posts have been clogging up the comments on my sites increasingly of late so I’ve decided to fight back and try to deflect some of the deluge.
I recented tried authimage, first blogged in June 2004.
This plugin added a Captcha to the comments form field. I picked this because it was listed on the WordPress Codex and seemed a nice idea.
The installation instructions are very poor but I got it running in <10 minutes. However, the amount of spam I received seemed to remain constant after installation, in fact, there’s a chance it actually increased!
Tip: Avoid authimage like the plague.
My next foray is using a dual plugin combo, Bad Behaviour and Comment Timeout.
Comment Timeout seems to work nicely with Bad Behaviour. It offers the opportunity to selectively close comments on your blog to help reduce spam by closing comments on old entries, examining your spam queue and your Bad Behavior logs and it allows you to reject comments that contain too many hyperlinks. Quite handy.
Well, I’ve just installed tonight so we’ll see where this gets.
