Comments on: WordPress: Dealing with Comment and User Registration Spam.

By: SEOKudos

SEOKudos — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:45:40 +0000

WordPress: Dealing with Comment and User Registration Spam….

Kudos for a great SEO article - Trackback from SEOKudos…

By: Tom Kacperski

Tom Kacperski — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:59:00 +0000

Thanks Ben!

Yes. Now that you mention, I also recall part of the WP-reCAPTCHA FAQ mentioned this. Once I find out that WordPress not Akismet deletes comments automatically after 15 days, I’ll disable Akismet. Until then I sort of rely on the Akismet auto delete functionality.

In a way this is good that reCAPTCHA makes comments indistinguishable (?) from Akismet caught spam and places them in the same queue. I’ll take advantage of it to block the worst offenders if I can from getting through the web server very far, in the way I outlined above.

Personally I’m fond of reCAPTCHA and can’t imagine any effective way against it regardless of various opinions. So because of this the fact that it wasn’t catching SPAM posts seamed very unlikely to me. I’m glad it is as since I installed it, I have seen a complete stop in SPAM ‘new comment’ messages in my inbox. On top of that I’m watching to see what effect it will have on reducing spam user registrations, as I just enabled it on that.

Again, thanks Ben! Keep up the great work!

By: Ben Maurer

Ben Maurer — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:32:52 +0000

Hi,

Due to the implementation of the reCAPTCHA plugin, spam caught by reCAPTCHA appears in the akismet queue. When one makes a request in the browser, the comment gets deleted from the akismet queue automatically, however many bots don’t trigger this code path.

Our recommendation is to turn off akismet (avoiding false positives) and then ignore the spam queue.