<\/a>
\nOver 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

Thanks to freezelight<\/a> for the cool photo<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Akismet rocks; upgrades bring hiccups”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[110,91,111,108,109,32],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-weblogs-and-cms","tag-akismet","tag-blogging","tag-captcha","tag-comment-spam","tag-spam","tag-wordpress"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-bu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":257,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/11\/15\/we-have-captchas-i-think\/","url_meta":{"origin":712,"position":0},"title":"We have CAPTCHAs! (I think)","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"15 Nov 05","format":false,"excerpt":"First, my apologies for the lengthy silence. Things have been very busy, and I wiped out pretty hard on my bike two weeks ago (all is well now...more later...maybe?) and that slowed a lot of things down at a time when I really couldn't much afford it. Sigh. The happy\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":107,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/05\/26\/thinking-of-trying-captchas\/","url_meta":{"origin":712,"position":1},"title":"Thinking of trying CAPTCHAs","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"26 May 05","format":false,"excerpt":"I just had to deal with an even 100 (!) spam comments posted to this weblog, mostly for medications promising endless nights of passion and fullfillment. At least that's a nice change from my e-mail spam, which has recently focussed on variants on the classic Nigerian oil scam. Thanks to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Weblogs and CMS"","block_context":{"text":"Weblogs and CMS","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/weblogs-and-cms\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":260,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/11\/20\/captchas-rock\/","url_meta":{"origin":712,"position":2},"title":"CAPTCHAs rock!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"20 Nov 05","format":false,"excerpt":"The CAPTCHAs seem to be working really well. I haven't had a single piece of comment spam since I installed it, and several \"real\" people have been able to leave cool comments (so we're not keeping the good people out). It's a little weird to not have all the spam\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Floating","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static.flickr.com\/22\/37070715_07bfc76320_t.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":248,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/10\/13\/when-life-gives-you-spam-make-lemonade\/","url_meta":{"origin":712,"position":3},"title":"When life gives you spam – make lemonade!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"13 Oct 05","format":false,"excerpt":"New Kid just posted a really wonderful analysis of a recent variant on the all-too-common Nigerian Oil Scam spam. What a hoot! Shows what can be accomplished if a keen mind is brought to bear on a problem of importance. Or, well, maybe not so much importance, but still quite\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Keeps inks fresh","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static.flickr.com\/23\/27770559_d103340399_m.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":289,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2006\/01\/07\/more-implausible-spam\/","url_meta":{"origin":712,"position":4},"title":"More implausible spam","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"7 Jan 06","format":false,"excerpt":"I just got two copies of the same spam about 11 minute apart (never a good sign), and this one has a particularly bizarre premise. Some fellow claiming to have been a former archbishop in the Catholic church apparently has $7.2 million that he wants to pass along to me\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"A wee bit creepy","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static.flickr.com\/37\/79657096_6cd343abb5_m.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":264,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/11\/28\/some-problems-with-captchas\/","url_meta":{"origin":712,"position":5},"title":"Some problems with CAPTCHAs","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"28 Nov 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Mr. Tozier was kind enough to get in touch with an example of a CAPTCHA image (see right) generated by the plug-in I'm trying out, and I must agree with his assessment that only a \"scarce class of psychics, known for their ability to read around the corners and edges\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}