Nerdaphernalia » spam

Quiz plugin v 1.1

Stephen R — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:37:58 +0000

There’s a new version of the Quiz plugin (a.k.a. “Comment Quiz”). The plugin requires commenters to answer a question before the comment is posted.

Significant improvements in 1.1, including a native meta box in the edit post/page screen, and the ability to have more than one acceptable answers to a question.

Check it out.

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Anti-Spam “Quiz” beta test

Stephen R — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:48:59 +0000

In the last couple weeks I have been working on a significant update to Andy Skelton’s Quiz plugin for WordPress. Andy gave me some feedback, which led to further fixes, and I think it’s working pretty well.

As of this morning I have turned off the Spam Karma plugin, which has been protecting this blog from comment spam¹ for a few years now. In its place I have activated a beta version of Quiz.

What the plugin does is add a question to the Comments form, which must be answered correctly before a comment is submitted. You can set a default question, set a different question per-post, or choose for a particular post to not have a question.

This is pretty close to a release version, I think, but I would appreciate some feedback from the community. It requires (I think) WordPress 2.5.

You can download it here: Quiz 1.1 beta 5

Note: If you have been using Andy’s version 1.0, the Q&As you have entered previously should still work, but you will have to re-enter your settings on the new admin page (no more editing PHP files). Also, rather than using pseudo-shortcodes, you now enter the Q&A in a regular meta box on the Edit Post screen. If there is demand, I may restore the ability to continue using the shortcode method, but for now it is gone.

[Update: If upgrading from 1.0, you must deactivate it and reactivate once to set the default preferences.]

1: I am, however, still running Bad Behavior as well.

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Spirony

Stephen R — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:27:14 +0000

Recently got a comment that seemed a little … fishy. It was on one of my WordPress plugin pages, and read something like “Interesting, I’ve never seen it explained that way before.” The page presents my plugin, but doesn’t really explain anything beyond presenting the plugin itself.

So I checked out the author link. Not totally spammy, really. The guy has some legitimate articles about blogging on there (assuming he didn’t scrape them from other sites). Then, three posts down, I see this post:

Comment Spamming? Really? Says Who?
December 7th, 2007 · No Comments

Recently, I have been reading about comment spamming. You know, where you go around various blogs and leave your comment just to get a link. And I don’t agree that it doesn’t work[....]

Hmmmm. You backlink your blog to my site, and lead me right to a post about how you think spamming people’s comments is a good idea.

D00d, that’s got “Akismet submission” written all over it. Seeya.

Moron.

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if Spam Blockers were Superheroes, this would be the JLA

Stephen R — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 03:07:38 +0000

Although this blog is not yet a month old, my other blog has been going for over three years now. It originally ran on a program called Greymatter, but it was not long before i moved to the much more flexible and powerful WordPress.

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of other bloggers complaining about the amount of comment spam they’ve been getting. I’ve personally been using a combination of anti-spam measures for the last six months or so which have resulted in virtually no spam. This is not to say that they haven’t been trying, but I seriously can’t remember the last time that a spam comment actually got through. (And crossing my fingers that some jackass out there isn’t going to see that as me throwing down the gauntlet!)

My first line of defense is a plugin called Bad Behavior. This one more or less works by looking not at the content of the post, but at the behavior of the posting program with reference to HTTP requests. In other words, when it works it blocks the spam before it ever really hits your server. Certain spambots look at your site, and get a “Forbidden” response — they never even see your page. That blocks a whole lot right there, and saves your server some workload.

After that, comments have to get past the excellent Spam Karma, which is a highly modular and flexible plugin. Basically, Spam Karma uses a number of highly specific filters, each one of which looks for a particular behavior that is normally indicative of spam (examples include looking for browsers that don’t understand Javascript, or visitors that post within seconds of first coming to the page). As each filter is passed or failed, the comment is assigned positive or negative points, and if the points are too low, the comment is blocked. As a fallback, if a comment is right near the borderline, the poster is (optionally) offered a captcha test to prove he’s a human being.

My third line of defense is what I believe really puts this method over the top. Anyone who has used WordPress has probably heard of Akismet, especially as it comes included with the most recent version of WordPress. Normally it runs as its own WordPress plugin, but I use it as just one of the many tests within Spam Karma, which I believe is more effective — the combination of the two is greater than the sum of them separately. That plugin for Spam Karma (not WordPress) is available at http://www.sebbi.de/.

So if you’re having spam troubles with spam comments on WordPress, try out this triple-combo.

Those links again:

Enjoy.

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