Uneasy Rhetoric

Very few people read this blog; nevertheless, I’ve been hit by auto-spammers. Ironically, all of the articles to which this person hocking the blue pill tried to comment were way back in the archive.

So far, Wordpress’ comment moderating with the spam words sent all 25-30 messages to me for moderation. This is fine, except that I could see myself moderating 50+ comments a day soon enough.

Requiring all comments to be moderated, or auto-deleting comments that fit a spam profile, wasn’t an option. I’ve seen too many false positives in my email spam catcher to understand that.

I came across this piece of advice; basically, if you rename your comments posting file and modify the code that calls it, you can thwart the auto-spammers. It won’t prevent someone from coming along and manually spamming your site, but since I’ve implemented this change, the spamming has stopped.

It isn’t perfect according to the comments in the Wordpress support post, but at least for now it has worked for me. We’ll see how long it takes.