Things I Like About WordPress 1.5: Improved Comment Moderation
So I have been using WordPress 1.5 for barely a week now. Today my site fell victim to its first comment spam attack since upgrading, receiving about 100 comments in an hour or so.
With my previous version of WordPress, I had basically gone to approving every comment, regardless of whether it was spam or not. I had also cut down the number of links allowed before moderation from 5 (the default) to 1. All comment spam usually has at least one link in it.
In addition to those drastic measures, I had installed Kitten’s Spaminator plugin. It helped some, even though it was only catching 1/4 of my comment spam.
So when I read that WordPress 1.5 was blocking comment spam without additional tools, I was somewhat excited. I loathe nothing more than opening up my e-mail and seeing 100+ messages notifying me that someone posted a comment on my site only to discover that they are all comment spam.
So after today’s torrent of comment spam, I am proud to report that none of it made it on to my site. I even returned the “links before moderation” to 5 and removed the “administrator must approve comments” requirement, and it still worked well.
One of the things that I think has made this new version so much better at dealing with comment spam is “emergent registration”.
What it does is the first time someone comments they are automatically held in moderation unless you’ve approved something from them before.
This means that if you have regular readers who comment often, they can go straight through moderation without needing approval (once you have approved them once). Otherwise, a comment is held in moderation until you approve it. You can alse use the built-in registration system to allow readers to register their information so that they can post comments without having to wait for moderation. By registering, readers can also post comments without having to worry about entering their name, e-mail, and URI everytime they post.
For an additional level of protection, you can put common comment spam terms into your blacklist. WordPress is also blocking open and insecure proxies, which is a large portion of the comment spam being generated.
This lastest release of WordPress has made administering your blog much easier thanks to these new features that take aim at eliminating comment spam from seeing the light of day.
February 22nd, 2005
Testing out your comments, to see if they work the way I WANT mine to.
February 22nd, 2005
Since that went through, maybe you can help me. My comments are requiring you to be logged in to the site as somebody, it defaults to anonymous with email of user@cafelog.com if you don’t register. Did you have that problem and fix it, or was it always working the old way?
February 22nd, 2005
My comments have pretty much stayed the same. When I am browsing the site, I see “logged in as Jeremy”, but others just see the same ol’ comment form.
I don’t think I did anything different. I did use the same config file as I had with WP1.2, so that may have made a difference.
I would just say to check out your discussion options. I have everything checked except “Administrator must approve comments”. Hope that helps.
February 22nd, 2005
Jeremy,
I must admit the new backend is a bit nicer. The developers did a great job at improving the spam blocking agents that come preinstalled. I’m interested to see what Chris J. and Michael come up with in their attempt to create an entirely new back end…I assume you’ve read about their plans on one of their sites.
Still looking forward to you doing a bit of styling. Your design definitely inspired what I have implemented at this time.
February 22nd, 2005
I was able to fix my comments issue by removing some code in wp-comments-post.php. So now I have NO complaints! This is definitely a big improvement over the previous versions.