Strangely Perfect

For no reason …other than a try-out and also the current anti-spam plugins miss the odd bit of comment spam, I’ve now switched off TanTanNoodles’ Spam filter and am giving WP-SpamFree another try plus another plugin, AVH.  I’ve left Akismet running regardless. WP-SpamFree This now promises a lot, so it’s worth another shot.  Two years [...]

Akismet Akismet is one key plugin that most people use to block spammers from a WordPress installation. However, it’s the second time since the 2.81 update that I’ve received  this error message. Last time, I clicked the “Check Network Status” button and Akismet flipped onto running on green.  Job done.  The IP addresses remained the [...]

The Intense Debate Install Story Along with some theme and plugins changes I’ve recently done, I’ve also had a play with Intense Debate (ID), a system complete with WordPress plugin for managing comments. Phase One Last week using my old theme I couldn’t get anywhere with the comment import. It kept crashing out at 9% [...]

Just for a while I’ve closed down the open comments access a bit (but not completely) until the splurge of spam has passed that started last night.  For some reason, Akismet etc missed a lot.  Hopefully, it’ll be back to it’s normal trappy self soon. My sites went slow with all the hits, but as [...]

Well it’s hard to say, actually.  I run this site on WordPress which dynamically uses a backend database and various plugins.  The thing is that I chop and change the various blocking systems for testing, failures, experiments and even because I like the name!  There a host of reasons. But my website has had millions [...]

….That’s what I’ve determined empirically recently.  Matt’s (WordPress prime mover) post here and this article in the Guardian mention the various failings of CAPTCHA. It’s the kind of thing that’s dawned on me progressively and is the reason I don’t use Captcha any more.  I’ve tested it and in the WordPress plugins that use it, [...]

Two WordPress trackback spams lead our hero to investigate their source and potential actions.

Revising the htaccess IP address block list in light of the results from recent experiments to find the current bad source addresses for registration and comment spam

I’ve had quite a few search enquiries and hits for komatoz.net on my sites recently so there are obviously a lot of people suffering out there with spamming and registration problems that I’ve “currently” ;-) got under control. (We all know that this is a continuous battle against spammers as their approaches and techniques change [...]