Spam, spam, WordPress and spam
It didn’t take long for this new shiny WordPress installation to show up on the radar of the spam juggernaut. Today, for whatever reason, some bots somewhere got this address and started posting ridiculous comments with URLs to some defunct online gambling house. WordPress even happily asked me to approve comments that were submitted to posts that didn’t even exist yet. After a few dozen iterations of that I was not a happy Zach.
Thankfully I came across Trenca Spammers. It is a great plugin which requires someone submitting a comment to enter a number which is presented as an image. In theory humans get through but software shouldn’t. It was a breeze to install and seems to work. Here’s to hoping.
Oh, and if it wasn’t already clear, if you make a living writing spam software then I am not very happy with you. You are a bad, bad, person.
Dria wrote:
Hooray! I’ve managed to avoid ye olde spambotte so far, but would like to fortify defenses before it gets me on radar. And now, to try to read and enter the little number doober below…
Posted on 03-Dec-04 at 4:57 am | Permalink
zab wrote:
So far, so good! Not a single spam post hit over night. Yesterday, at its peak, they were hitting every 10 minutes or so.
Posted on 03-Dec-04 at 9:01 am | Permalink
Karin wrote:
Imagine my surprise when I decided to check your blog for the first time in months and it was full of interesting Zach and Alice information! I am soooo jealous about your trip to New York…I’ve never been there. Sadly Brad and I had to content ourselves the corporate commercialism of Disneyland a few weeks ago (we had a awesome time!). I am very impressed with the photo plugin too!
Posted on 03-Dec-04 at 9:17 am | Permalink
zab wrote:
> and it was full of interesting Zach and Alice information!
I’m glad :) I’m trying to warm Alice to the idea of rolling one of her own.
Posted on 03-Dec-04 at 9:42 am | Permalink
rob wrote:
Yes! That is a great plugin. Kudos for finding it. I’ve already managed to lower my spam count to zero.
Is there a Zach and Alice FAQ? Maybe there should be one.
Posted on 06-Dec-04 at 12:15 pm | Permalink
Deniz wrote:
Saw a timely reminder and realised I hadn’t visited your blog in a long time. Very happy to see the wordpress as I can snarf the RSS feed and view your stuff along with everything else I read. But enough about me….
You and Alice are looking good — it’s nice to see photos. I fully support convincing her to join the dark side and blog (again). Any visits out around Ottawa/Montreal planned for anytime soon?
Posted on 07-Dec-04 at 5:16 am | Permalink
zab wrote:
> You and Alice are looking good
Thanks :)
> Any visits out around Ottawa/Montreal planned for anytime soon?
Sadly, no, but Toronto is more and more likely.
Posted on 08-Dec-04 at 10:42 am | Permalink