Combatting comment spam
It is amazing what some marketing people will do to advertise their product. Apparently, comment spam is the newest evil making its way around the net. And today, fuzzyLizard fell victim to it. I have received over 200 spam comments today alone. Thankfully, WordPress flags any comment containing more than 5 links as spam and does not post it. As a result, none of the comments made it to out into the open. However, I still had to go through and delete them all.
By doing a little searching on the WordPress website, I found a wonderful little plugin, SpamWordBlock, that actually scans each comment for a list of words (all listed in a blacklist file) before the comment is placed in the database. This means no more spam, at least so far. The plugin scans the Name, email address, URL, message text and the IP address of the sender for any words in the blacklist. This means I can block spammers by their IP and/or email address. And the best part is that I don’t have to go and delete the comments after they have been posted. The plugin never lets the comment through.
Personally, I think this is better than making everyone register before they can place comments. However, if you get a blank page with the words “spam words detected” try again with a different comment. This means something in your comment has triggered the plugin. Nothing personal, just trying to make my life a little easier.