Yeah. Hi.
Okay,
I know, the site hasn’t been updated in over a week. And I was supposed to run a contest last week. All I can say is that we’re down to less than two weeks on Sims Castaway Stories and that’s taking up all my time. That also means that I didn’t get to go to the lecture last night, thus there is no recap. I apologize.
And I just had to wade through seven hundred spam comments.
This project will wrap up (or at least slack off) soon, though, and things will get back to normal. Just in time for me to start working on the holiday dinners!
I had a real problem with spam posts on my forum until I added a new field to my user registration page.
After name and email address there is a question “are you a spam bot?”
If the registrant types anything other than “no” in that field, he is directed to a page that says “We don’t serve your kind here, robot,” and the registration is not submitted.
(The field must be checked server side, of course, because spam-bots don’t tend to run javascript.)
If you add a required “are you a spam-bot?” field to your comment form, you could even use a gmail filter to defeat the silly robot comments.
I’ve had good results from the spam filter built into wordpress. You have to sign up with them but it has worked very well.
Well, the spam filter catches all the spam comments – they don’t go on the site, they go into the moderation queue. But then I have to go through and actually delete them all manually, filtering out the few good comments at the same time. I wish there was an option for WordPress that would just make it go ahead and delete any comment it thinks is spam – because 99.999% of the time, it’ll be right. I’m sure there is one, I just haven’t done enough research.
I just added a recaptcha plugin for wordpress. It requires the user to enter two words in. Someone claimed that they no longer had spam to deal with eventually. So I just started it.
http://recaptcha.net/
Keith
But what if I *AM* a spam-bot?!? Botists!!
Um. Er. Never mind.