Haddow Press Experiment

Blogs, Spam, and Deterants

Archived in Technology, Design |

There are a number of great plugins available for FREE to prevent (or usually merely reduce) spam from appearing in the comments section of your blog. This site relies on a number of actions to prevent spam within these pages:

1. The first line of defense is Akismet. You may have heard of this fantastic plugin. It uses a central repository for known spam and spamming patterns and filters those posts directly into a temporary holding bin. Usually a quick visual scan of the list lets us know what is good and what isn’t.

2. The second line of defense is reputation. Having posted a comment previously on this site will give you some credibility and you will more easily make it through the filters.

3. If this still leaves us with too much to handle, we are thinking of implementing a captcha that will layer a please-retype-the-characters from the blurry-image-above question as part of the submission process.

We find that with these three lines of defense, and having a heavily scoured blog, we tend to only get one or two messages that don’t belong through our filter every few days.

I was thinking of writing a plugin (or adapting a plugin) to add a small extra feature to the spam filter. I’d like to have the ability to redirect a known “spammer” to a different URL. In this way I could set up a kind of “please fuck off” message on a separate domain that would result in a dead end message if someone began spamming the site. If anyone knows of something like this, please post a comment. I’ll try not to filter your suggestions.

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Read more posts by Brad K (About the Author)

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