by Haggis (Sean Loyless)
September 20th, 2005 @ 12:23 pm
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Haggis: 1, Spammers: 0
Well, as some of you might have noticed, I changed the way my commenting is done a few weeks back in an effort to cull the massive amount of spam comments I was receiving per day. While the few WordPress plugins I was using helped, I still spent a good 30 minutes a day erasing comments or “marking as spam”, and frankly I was getting fed up.
While I always encourage commenting on my articles, it was getting to the point of frustration just dealing with it at all. I was originally looking for something like the “number verification system” you see on forums or other registration sights (ie it shows you a random image with numbers in it and you must type the numbers to verify), but I couldn’t find anything like that. What I did find was the “Comment Previewing.”
The Previewing function lets you put in your comment like normal, but when you hit “Submit” it will display the comment for you again, allowing you to make further changes or to finalize it by hitting the “Submit” button again. While this can be annoying for the real user, I’ve found that not a single spambot has support for this kind of work-around. Since I installed the comment previewing, I have only received ONE spam message in the past THREE WEEKS! Yes, THREE WEEKS! The one that slipped through looked to be an actual person inputting it as it didn’t reek of the typical spambot nonsense. Still got caught in moderation, so it never actually hit the site.
If you post a comment and it doesn’t show up, don’t fret; it probably got caught in moderation. I’ve noticed this with @yahoo and @hotmail.com addresses, simply because they are notorioius for sending spam through. I still receive message when comments get put in moderation, and am usually pretty quick about approving them. Hopefully this will cull the nonsense for a while until some other low-life bastard figures out how to write a bot around it. And they will.. because they’re low life bastards. 
