That’s enough of that
Recently this blog has been absolutely plagued with comment spam. This stuff is more sophisticated than it used to be; it often has only one link in it and it reads like a real (if somewhat lame) comment, so it can’t be warded off just by blocking anything with the word ‘viagra’ in it. I wasn’t sure why it was so bad – Conscious Entities was getting very little spam, in spite of its massively larger traffic.
So eventually I looked for a captcha plug-in. You may know that captcha is that thing where typically you have to type in a word shown in a distorted picture to prove you’re a human being rather than a spambot before your comment or whatever will be accepted. I’m told that really good spambots are now getting better at reading from distorted pictures than human beings, but in most cases it still seems to work well.
Anyway, browsing through the WordPress plugins which offer some kind of comment captcha, I found one that, by dint of doing something far too clever for me to understand, was apparently able to detect robotic submissions without requiring human users to do anything. Couldn’t be bad. I downloaded the files, installed and activated.
It was 100% successful in warding off spam; unfortunately it was also pretty good at warding me off, too. I found I was no longer able to log into my own blog. But now I’m back! In the end I had to go in and mess with the database manually (or by means of PHP something or other), which although it was actually perfectly straightforward, I find a bit scary.
As I was about to install a different anti-spam measure, I noticed that Akismet was deactivated. Am I an idiot or what? (Akismet is the basic anti-spam plugin which is normally the first line of defence for WordPress). In essence, I’d been running with nothing but a blacklist to protect me.
Anyway – enough of that.
