Over the weekend I finally found time for a major set of upgrades to all of the family blogs. One of many impetuses for this was the vast ocean of comment spam that I was dealing with from my blog. I had a CAPTCHA plugin running on this blog which wasn’t always easy for human users to deal with, and which was largely failing to keep out the spam. I was still getting 50-100 e-mails a day announcing the arrival of yet another bit of blog spam, and it sucked.
As part of the upgrade I turned on the Akismet anti-spam plugin that now comes standard with WordPress, and man is it wonderful. In the few days that it’s been working, it’s (correctly) identified roughly 100 spam messages per day, keeping them out of my mail spool and management work flow on the blog.
Unfortunately I only half turned off the old CAPTCHA plugin. The plugin code was all turned off, but the formatting of the comment submission area still had a (now empty) box for the authentication image, and the box for you to type in the code (which you couldn’t see). It turns out that you could post a comment ignoring the code, but that was hardly obvious from a user standpoint, and happily one of our regular readers pointed out the problem.
I believe the problem is now fixed, and I would be grateful if a few folks would post a randomoid comment on this post just to verify that all is now well.
If the Akismet tool continues to do such a good job, I’d like to turn off moderation altogether so that people’s comments will appear immediately. Stay tuned!
Thanks to freezelight for the cool photo.
