Asymptomatic

Wanna beat CAPTCHA detection? It’s only 24 hours of development.

I was reading a post from the Weblog Tools Collection about making a quicktag toolbar for the comment area, and decided to go for it.

It turned out to be a pretty simple task. You can see the results in the comment form at the bottom of this post.

A long time ago, I read this ten-minute introduction to writing well and thought it was good before I realized that it was written by Stephen King.

This is for my mom and Nana, who have been known to be unable to pack only a single, reasonably-sized bag.

I put my current version of OSA online. To refresh your memory, OSA is a spam filter for WordPress. The development precept is to keep in lockstep with WP 1.5 development so that it’s a working solution when 1.5 is complete.

The new version uses a three-strikes-like method of filtering on the common set of criteria. The main things that this filter does that others do not are:

• Provide reasons for what it does with the comment that are easy to view in both the digest-based email reports and the comment management page.
• Use peer-to-peer blacklist distribution so that no central site is attacked for attempting to thwart spam.
• Provides a professional interface for both managing spam moderation and dealing with spammers.

This plugin actually rehashes a lot of what the core WordPress spam stuff does, but provides reporting features that WordPress does not. For instance, WordPress will summarily delete comments that contain entities in the a-z range. This is fine, but I want to know that it happens, and WordPress wil not inform you of this.

WordPress also doesn’t do anything to slow down the submission of comment spam, and the beginnings of that code exists in OSA.

I’m not putting this forward as a complete solution for spam. The blog software is beta and the spam filter is alpha. There are incomplete pieces, notably the granular blacklist editing. Due to the nature of the peer-to-peer blacklists, scanning the blacklists is going to be more important. There should be tools (not included in this distribution) that help manage that.

All of the warnings aside, with relatively infrequent babysitting, the code is performing well. I think I blew through the last of the trackback spam bugs yesterday, and the interface has been revised to reflect the new weighted rating system.