MaW’s Blog

WordPress doesn’t seem to have the same kind of hooks for plugins to stop comment spam that Movable Type has. It seems that the Blacklist plugin only holds spam for moderation instead of rejecting it outright, and also that it’s impossible to have email when someone posts a comment but not email when someone posts a comment which is held for moderation. Maybe this will be added soon… anyway, it’s been fairly time-consuming to deal with, although easier than MT without MT-Blacklist.

Thus I’ve added a fairly rudimentary little plugin that should deny comments on all entries over 21 days old. So you won’t be able to comment on the old stuff anymore, but since nobody legitimate ever did that anyway, I’m sure nobody will mind, and it might just reduce the volume of comment spam I’m getting.

One thing that is good though is that WordPress does come with the ability to filter comments based on spam words and how many links they’ve got, so even though I’ve had a huge moderation queue every morning for the last week or so, none of the spam has ever appeared on the site itself. Go away spammers, your spam will gain you nothing here. In order to get a spam up here you have to:

• get past the WordPress Blacklist plugin
• get past the WordPress spam words list
• get past the one-URL-per-comment restriction

And then I’ll notice it and delete it. Goodbye!