Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I was considering This Chick’s anti-spam checkbox solution to fight my continuing spam problems, but I decided to go with Gene Shepherd’s step-by-step solution. Jeff Barr has a similar approach.

They all work the same way: add a new required field to the comment form, and spambots designed for the average blog comment form can’t fill it in right. Manual spammers can still type in their spam, but they don’t send 100-200 spam comments a day. I also noticed that I hadn’t renamed wp-comments-popup.php, so I changed that, too.

I’ll be backing down on my moderation requirements to see how well the new despamination works, so you can say “incest” in my comments again (for the time being). Now to post a test comment…

[Update] The test worked, but I think the spam is still coming in. I wonder if they’re scraping each HTML form. I may need to use This Chick’s trick after all, since it has the added human-interaction barrier.

[Update II] Note the snazzy new checkbox.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2005 at 12:23 am and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.