Well, after several months of peace, the spammers have figured out a way aroung the little secret code thing and started placing spam comments on my site. Only two so far, but it's annoying. I do not maintain a site for the purpose of advertising your product!
Anyway, I made some changes to the site in a hopefully not futile attempt to ward them off. Most of them are behind the scenes (renaming the comment script file), but one you'll notice is that I changed the comment link on the index pages (main page, monthly and category archives) to go to the permalink rather than a pop up comment window. I think this is a change for the better as well as making it hard for spammers to find my comment script.
On an interesting, but completely unrelated note, the other salguod on the net (see this post, my 4th!) has his own blog now too called You Must Be Present to Win. I gather from his posts that he's a lawyer. I think I'll go leave a comment just to make him wonder.
They went after me as well. I finally got them off, but I'm sure they'll be back.
By the way, the conference in Rome was a lot of fun. Like anything else, some things awful, some things great, more than anything, the people were fun. More on that later.
This is the second time for me. I implemented the 'Scode' (Secret Code) plug in for Movabletype after that one and it's been very effective up until now. So far so good, we'll see how long it lasts.
I can't believe you went to a Douglas Jacoby teaching conference for your honeymoon. When we went on ours, well, lets just say we weren't interested in spending time around other folks. ;-)
Well, it wasn't the only thing we did on our honeymoon. We arrived two days early and left one day late.
Besides, from last year's conference, I met some folks outside the US that reaffirm my belief that the ICoC cannot change without outside help. Chicago is doing some interesting things like taking classes from Abilene that are designed for ICoC ministers. I think that's great.
I don't want to knock them on this effort because it's needed everywhere, but it still demonstrates a top-down mentality. In any case, I'm glad to see their efforts.
As far as the plugin goes, I wished it worked for Wordpress. I can disregard comments that contain certain words, but then no one can discuss poker on my site ever again.
Pinakidion-
The filter only queues comments containing words like poker for moderation - it doesn't delete them. It also sends you an email about the comments awaiting moderation. If you like, you can also specify "poker-" instead of "poker", or use whatever text string shows up in the comment spam.
Salguod-
No lovebunnies.cgi for you, huh? I had to do the same thing within WP, and it's worked so far. One good thing about comment spambots is that they aren't very smart, so renaming seems to do the trick for now.
Nope, no lovebunnies. If we all use the same name, it defeats the purpose of renaming. :-)
Well, it didn't work. :-( Still getting a trickle of spam from one particular web site. I sent them an email (from an account that I don't use) and told them to stop. That ought to fix it, right? :-)
Hey--Leave my lovebunnies.cgi alone! I don't go harassing you about your script names behind your back, do I? ;)
OK, time for a reality check. Jared over at Mysterium Tremendum complains about the 100 spam comments a day he's deleted in recent days. Ouch. One of his commentors is happy that his spam is down to 2,000 per week from 26,000! Ouch! I've only had to deal with, oh, about 6 - 8. Ever. And only 3 of those since the Scode plug in. I guess it's working pretty good after all.