spam

New WordPress Plugins

I’ve installed a couple of new WordPress plugins that are very useful so I thought it was worth sharing the goodies.

The first one is best applied to WordPress 2.0.5 and above and is called Clutter Free. It’s role in life is to allow an author to disable unused components of the create post screen in WordPress, so giving a faster loading and clutter free page. Works a treat and gets rid of a lot of unused functionality…for me at least.

Second is Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP. Certainly a mouthful but is saving me from more spam, this time via the old comment form I used to employ. Over the last few days I’d received over 200 comments via the Contact form linked to at the top of the site. It was making it difficult to pull out good comment from spam. This new plugin seems to have done the trick and since implementing last night has seen two good comments succeed in reaching me and 25 spam comments being removed. Joy. Hopefully others can get mileage out of them too.

Spam Karma

Installed a new spam plug-in – Spam Karma. Since Friday night it has blocked 270 spam comments from being entered. 270 in just over 36 hours. It has many more options than the previous plug-in I was using and it seems to be doing a good job of picking up any new comments that shouldn’t be displayed. Like spam mail and spyware, spam commenting (and soon to be spam trackbacks) are ruining the net for the average user.

Blog Updates

Just a quick post to say that I installed Gallery a couple of weekends ago and it looks like it may have screwed up a bit of the site (dodgy htaccess rules) so apologies for any hassle cause and thanks to Graham for the heads up. My Gallery installation can be found here – it will be updated soon with some photo’s from yesteryear, including university days which are a very long 10 years ago. Gallery has been moved to Flickr which is far better than hosting locally, stores all image sizes possible and allows you to tag, comment and organise your photo’s. Should have moved ages ago..

I also seem to be suffering from some comment issues. Lewis had mentioned this ages ago which was fixed by refreshing my comment blacklist but Gordon was having issues earlier today (again thanks for the heads up). I’ll look into a different comment spam solution later in the week – I’m hoping the above issue may have caused comment issues as well.

Finally – some small updates on the right hand side including a sideblog powered by del.icio.us all in preparation for a WordPress 1.5 upgrade in the not too distant future. The links are pretty predictable but the Gran Turismo kid is my favourite so far.

Comment Problems

Lewis mentioned I had some comment problems. I’ve cleaned out and re-populated my blacklist – hopefully problems are now resolved – but an avalanche of spam will await my return.

Sigh – the website is being hit with comment spam more than ever. I’ve employed wp-blacklist and it gets most of the spam but every so often some of the crap slips through. Hey-ho…not to worry. If you use WordPress the Weblog Tools Collection site is well worth a visit. Looks like some new comment moderation software is in development. Cool.