I’ve had lively discussion with others about how to better handle comment spam in WordPress over at the wp-hackers mailing list. There is a lot of theory over there.
So to get things rolling, I assembled an anti-spam plugin called OSA. OSA will do a number of things that I’ve hand-tweaked WordPress to do in the past, including filtering out comments that use HTML entities.
The truth is that fighting spam is going to be an ongoing fight. If it was easy thing to get rid of, they would already have done it with email. But there really isn’t a solution there.
It seems like every time I post something here about what I do to fight spam, the spammers read it and update their software. Then I update mine, and so on. Well, hopefully we’ll see a general end to that soon. Remember, I wrote a bayesian filter for my own mail server, I can certainly do something similar for PHP and WordPress. Maybe I’ll incorporate it into OSA.
Anyhow, if you’re on WordPress, try it out. You’ll need a recent CVS checkout version of WordPress 1.3, though. I’m not sure how far you can go back before there are things missing. This plugin uses some of the new admin menu insertion features, which worked out very nicely.
I’ve also been kind of quiet over the past 24 because I’m working on a new “secret project”. Something else has been bugging me lately, and I’m finally going to do something about it. If I stick with it, maybe you’ll hear more in the coming week or two.
