Comment Spam Filter Added
With the recent release of Typogrify for Textpattern, Zenlog has started attracting enough traffic to draw spammers. Textpattern is fairly spam-resistant by default, but it isn’t perfect. Every couple of days, about a dozen comments full of the most vile stuff on the internets would sneak through Textpattern’s built-in defenses and show up here for the world to see.
To put a stop to this, I’ve started filtering comments with a customized version of Brian Warren’s anti-spam plugin mrw_spamkeywords_urlcount. Now when you submit a comment, one of three things will happen:
- Your comment will appear, just like it always did. Congratulations! There’s absolutely nothing suspicious about your comment.
- You’ll see a green error message where the comment form used to be, informing you that your comment is being held for moderation. The spam filter thought something about your comment looked a little fishy. It’s only a piece of software, so don’t take it personally. I’ll review your comment soon, and approve it if it’s legitimate.
- You’ll be shown your comment preview again, but this time with a red error message underneath it. The filter is pretty sure that your comment is spam. Fear not—the error message will give you a vague suggestion for how to get legitimate comments posted without aggravating the spam filter. Can’t be too specific, or it would make things easy for the spammers.
I don’t expect many problems with legitimate comments getting wrongly flagged. I apologize in advance if it does happen.
If you notice any really weird behavior—like your perfectly innocent comments getting repeatedly rejected—contact me to explain (calmly, please) what happened and how.
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