Tag Archives: Akismet

Awesome spam filtering for WordPress

By Dougal | Published: January 14, 2009

I’ve always felt that Akismet does a pretty good job of filtering out spam. After all, since I started using it, Akismet has caught around 500,000 spam comments for me. But a few months ago, I decided to try out a different anti-spam plugin that caught my eye. . [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged antispam anti-spam, blacklist, comments, Email, harvesters, httpbl, project honeypot, Spam, spammers, WordPress, wordpresswednesday | 20 Comments

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

By Dougal | Published: March 13, 2007

One of the coolest things about WordPress is the powerful Plugin API which allows us to create add-ons which can radically extend the basic functions of our sites. Most plugins can be used simply by dropping them into your plugins folder and activating them. I don’t use a ton of plugins compared to some people — I can be a bit picky about what I add. And I’m not going to list every plugin that I’ve got active here, but I thought I’d point out a few of my favorites:

Akismet: There are a lot of people who swear by Bad Behavior or Spam Karma 2. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Software, Tech, WordPress | Also tagged PHP, plugin, Plugins, Spam, this-site, WordPress | 35 Comments

Follow you, follow me

By Dougal | Published: February 15, 2007

Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. [...]

Posted in Blogging, Microformats, Plugins, Search, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged commentspam, Google, Metadata, nofollow, PageRank, plugin, Spam, WordPress, yahoo | 89 Comments

WordPress 2.1 Released

By Dougal | Published: January 22, 2007

Hot off the presses is the latest feature release of our favorite blogware: WordPress 2.1 “Ella”. You can find a bore-you-to-tears detailed list of bugfixes and feature changes in the Milestone report over on Trac. But here’s my version of the short list of changes:

Tabbed WYSIWYG/Code editing: You can now easily switch back and forth between the WYSIWIG (AKA: RTE, or “Rich Text Editor”) and the old-style editor with quicktags.
Autosave: When editing posts, your changes are automatically saved every two minutes, as long as you’ve set a title.
Spellcheck: The RTE now includes a spelling checker. [...]

Posted in Announcements, Blogs, Software, WordPress | Also tagged plugin, Plugins, Releases, Spam, Web, WordPress | 21 Comments

Some blog spam cases you might want to watch for

By Dougal | Published: October 27, 2006

I like to think that I’ve got some pretty decent spam prevention measure in place on my server. My mail server uses RBL/DNSBL services and sets maximum limits for certain protocol violations. All my blogs use Akismet for comment spam detection. I’ve got a large number of entries in my comment moderation and blacklist lists. And I hook it all together into my SpamValve plugin, which automatically adds firewall rules to block repeat offenders.

Still, though, occassionally I get bursts of traffic that either aren’t detected by these measures, or that are detected, but the process of handling the connection causes excessive load on the system. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Software, Spam, Tech, WordPress | Also tagged commentspam, Email, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Spam, SpamValve, this-site, WordPress | 11 Comments

Yahoo! Web Hosting adds WordPress

By Dougal | Published: December 20, 2005

Double Yow! Another announcement from Matt: Yahoo! Web Hosting has added WordPress to their offerings. And as an added bonus, they automatically enable the Akismet plugin, which is going to add a wealth of data to that service’s spam filters.

Posted in Announcements, Blogs, WordPress | Also tagged plugin, Spam, WordPress, yahoo | 3 Comments

Poisoning the well

By Dougal | Published: December 6, 2005

Overall, the volume of spam attempts on my server have been down lately. Oh, I still get a steady stream, I delete over 100 comment spams (caught by my filters) each day. But I’ve seen fewer of the massive, server-squashing spam runs that hammer my web service with too many simultaneous connections, blocking out legitimate users.

On the other hand, I’m seeing a lot more attempts by spammers to poison the well. What I mean by that is that they are submitting bogus comments, full of non-spammy (but more-or-less random) content, and links to legitimate web sites. [...]