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Comments Section

The spambots have been hitting the article comments section of this site pretty hard lately. So far they’ve been caught before anything got posted, but I’m getting tired of having to delete them all in the “moderation” queue every day, so I’m using some new anti-spambot plugins on this blog that should just block them entirely. It shouldn’t impact legitimate posters, but if it does, please send me an e-mail to aaronc*at*bluestateupdate.com (just replace the *at* with the at symbol of course) and let me know you had a problem posting.

Posted by Aaron on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 2:20 pm.

3 Responses to “Comments Section”

Yesterday on Hannity’s radio show, Rumsfeld said “We
have not lost 1 thing in Iraq. ” Let’s keep him
accountable for such an arrogant comment. He owes all
service men an apology. He owes all Americans an
apology. Maybe Rumsfeld has not lost a thing. Let’s
get that silver spoon out of his mouth and fire his
ass.
Rich

Left by Rich Opiola on October 25th, 2006

I too have been plagued by the demonic spam bots. Yesterday, I made some adjustments on the Options tab under the WordPress administration panel. If I recall correctly, my tweaking involved limiting the amount of urls in each comment to “1,” and I’m pretty sure I made it so folks had to register on the site. Registration was the last thing I wanted to do - it being a MASSIVE turn-off and all - but being greeted by 200+ pieces of comment spam at each check-in was an even more MONUMENTAL turn-off.

I want to thank you for the permalink, and will gladly reciprocate once I’m back before the WPress admin screen later tonight.

Yours is an excellent and thoughtful blog.

Catchya later.

L

Left by Lisa English on October 25th, 2006

Hi Lisa. Thanks for the kudos… I went to contact you from your site, but I see your comments are turned off. Hopefully you’ll see this.

There are two tools that seem to be helping (and apparently, since these two comments got through ok, I think I’m not rejecting any legitimate posters).

I tried setting many “blacklist” words, but it wasn’t terribly effective, so I did the following:

First, I upgraded my version of WordPress to the latest. Then there are two plugins that I am using. The first gets most of the spam. It’s called “Bad Behavior,” and you can set it aggressively, or not so aggressively. I had to set it to aggressive because some spam was still getting through. It also says how many pieces of spam it has rejected (and you can enable logging if you want to keep track of everything). So far, in two days, over 500 pieces of comment spam rejected. After that, there is another plugin called Akismet that catches everything else. I don’t think you’ll be alerted to each piece of spam, but at any time you can go into the Akismet queue and “manage” your spam. I think Bad Behavior is working well enough for me that I could probably disable Akismet, but I’m leaving it on anyway.

I too didn’t want to mandate registrations. Bad Behavior seems to be catching all the bad guys, and I highly recommend it.

Thanks again, and your blog rocks!

Left by admin on October 25th, 2006

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