Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, has written a plugin to combat the most annoying thing on the Internet. No, the dancing baby and the hamsterdance are both untouched by this coding (more’s the pity). The biggest problem any blogger faces is spam, whether that spam is in the comments or in trackbacks. If you don’t get any spam, you’re either new to blogging or you’ve taken some major steps to avoid spam.
Those steps all have one thing in common. They sacrifice a portion of your site’s usability in their attempts to keep the spammers out. Every blogger who has used such methods has a story of a legitimate comment being refused. Every commenter gets tired of typing in the code that will allow their comment, even though we understand why this measure has become necessary. Spam steals bandwidth, it counterfeits another person’s support of the product being presented, it is a nuisance that sullies the original intent of the Internet. I daresay that any Christian blogger is under the cultural mandate to take steps to avoid the promotion of spam on their blogs. I have tried several methods to do this, and all have had their shortcomings.
Since I have added this program, I have been witness to a great decrease in the spams I have received. Matt’s plugin, called Automattic Spam Stopper has been tweaked a few times and the spams have been reduced and reduced until it has become an anomaly that any one will get through. I also have not been notified of any legitimate comments to be blocked. As I walk across the dewy grass and imagine the crunch crunch of the frost that will soon be there, I hear only that. There is no sound coming from the spams as they have been put down. It frightens me and makes me want to run. Oh wait. That’s from The Silence of the Lambs. But you get the idea.
WordPress users will be notified on the Dashboard when this plugin can be released to the public and those not fortunate enough to be using WP will know as I make that announcement here. Commenters should not have to jump through hoops and spammers should not have access to my blog for their purposes. Thanks to Automattic Spam Stopper (I do hope he changes the name…) my blog is protected better than Tom Brady’s five layers of Visa protection!
Oh, spam is the worst. I don’t use WordPress (I’m not 1337 enough to learn PHP, MySql, etc.) but I use Movable Type. They’re pretty good about the plugins too for getting rid of spam. Well, at least 3.2 is.
I still swear by SpamKarma though I will look into this when it comes out.
Since I have had version 2 on my blog (Mid August), it has caught 61,054 spam. Since I have been running this version, no spam has gotten through and I have only had to delete a couple from moderation. I haven’t heard of anyone not being allowed to legitimately post. It has been very successful for me.
There was one of my comments from several posts back that never went through (about the pledge of allegiance), but that may have been purposeful. Hope all is well with you.
Spam Karma is NOT working for me! No matter how I change the settings, it still blocks some legit comments and lets through cas*no, bla*kjack, etc. I even have to go into moderation to approve about 50% of my OWN comments!
If you guys would stop having first rate blogs, you wouldn’t have this problem!
I don’t!
Please hurry. A spammer posted 450 ads for ringtones and low interest mortgages this morning.
[...] The Silence of the Spams by Doug McHone [...]
@Ben – I know no php/mysql and I get along just fine with WP, as do many many others. Gice it a whirl
[...] You may remember an earlier post entitled The Silence of the Spams where I announced the impending WordPress plugin called Automattic Spam Stopper. This plugin has recently been released as a publicly available plugin renamed Akismet. For a month or so, I have had only one other anti-spam measure on my site, that being a command to hold a comment for moderation if there are more than two links on it. My blacklist is clear and there are no key words to force any comment to moderation. This is usually information that I wouldn’t dare to release, but since I have been using this plugin I have lost my fear of spam. Seriously, I get maybe 3-4 spams a week using this setup. As you know, there are no codewords to type in to post a comment here, no skewed letters to decipher before your comment is allowed and no requirement that you have a positive comment in the past. [...]
[...] McHone says: ondan beri I -si olmak mülhak bu bilgisayar programý, I -si olmak be tanýk -e doðru a büyük [...]
[...] The Silence of the Spams by Doug McHone [...]