Site Changes

Good morning.

I recently changed my Wordpress theme to the minimalist blog.txt design. In addition to being very clean-looking, it permits the use of WP Widgets Plugin.

While these changes looked good, suddenly my highly effective spam filter, Spam Karma 2, is failing to stop a wave of comment spam. I don’t know if it’s coincidental or not. I am tweaking some settings and monitoring comments carefully. If yours get moderated, there’s no need to post again, I will recover it promptly.

Trackbacks & Pings

  1. Six Meat Buffet » SpamSpamBaconSausageEggAndSpam on 06 Jun 2006 at 10:21 pm

    […] Thanks to the Commie and William Teach for their suggestions - I’ve added Akismet to the sp@m fighting brigades and we’ll see how it goes overnight. […]

Comments

  1. Preston T. Holmes wrote:

    Commie - I’m having the same problem with SK2 not stopping comment spam. I’m using the plugin that forces moderation and it’s failing at times too. It seems like a WP/SK2-themed attack. If you find a solution to this, please post it. It’s drivin’ me nuts.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 9:55 am

  2. Michael wrote:

    I like the new look.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:01 am

  3. Michael wrote:

    In particular, I especially like the little buttons above the comment window that spare me the bother of typing tags.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:08 am

  4. commissar wrote:

    Thanks, Preston,

    Now I will stop driving myself crazy, wondering if it was my recent changes. The spammers seem to be using blogspot URLs to identify themselves, and this was boosting their User Granularity scores. So I disabled that item on my SK2 dashboard.

    I think that’s helping, but it’s too early to tell. If you find any good techniques, please let me know, too.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:09 am

  5. commissar wrote:

    Michael,

    Thanks. The little buttons above the comment window are something different - Comment Quicktags. See post a couple days ago.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:10 am

  6. Scott wrote:

    Consider using Akismet. I hear often of similar complaints with SK2, as themes themselves don’t affect WordPress itself. Akismet works flawless as its creator is the the main person behind WP.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:31 am

  7. commissar wrote:

    Scott,

    I have the Akismet plugin enabled. But it does nothing. Does SK2 prevent Akismet from operating?

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:40 am

  8. Preston Taylor Holmes wrote:

    Good question about Akismet - I remember reading somewhere that the two were incompatible, but I’m certainly willing to try it at this point.

    I’ll let you know if I find any silver bullets, Commie.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:43 am

  9. commissar wrote:

    Preston,

    I found a plugin that enables Akismet to run within SK2.

    The SK2 settings confuse me. I think that they may be relative to each other. So making all of them “Supastrong” might be self-defeating. With that idea in mind, I left the new Akismet piece and a couple others as “Supastrong.” All the other criteria I reduced to “Normal” or “Weak.”

    And I wholly Disabled the User Granularity. SK2 kept giving some phony blogspot-using spammers lots of good karma.

    Basically, I have SK2 running in front, with Akismet as a “Supastrong” backup.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 1:17 pm

  10. Scott wrote:

    Do you have an Akismet API key? It’s necessary for the plugin to work. I mean, I have Akismet on my site and it catches ~100 spam comments a day. I haven’t had one slip through and I don’t use anything else—no verification code, math, etc. etc.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 1:31 pm

  11. commissar wrote:

    Scott,

    Thanks, I have an API key. Actually, I think it’s a Wordpress API key, but it works with Akismet.

    I rather like SK2, and have enabled the Akismet plugin within it, but if SK2 has problems, it’s good to know that I can rely on Akismet alone.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 2:21 pm

  12. William Teach wrote:

    Hey, commissar, I am having the same issues. Are you getting ones from blogspot address’? That is what I am getting.

    I am trying a tiny little comment program, wp-Gatekeeper, just adds a challenge phrase. Very simple.

    I’ll have to see if it works, let ya know

    http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/wordpress/wp-gatekeeper/

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 7:55 pm

  13. William Teach wrote:

    I guess it is helpful to read the previous comments, I guess it is blogspot ones. My bad.

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 7:57 pm

  14. Preston Taylor Holmes wrote:

    Commie - thanks for the help - I’ve done the same thing you did and hopefully will have the same happy results. PTH

    Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 10:12 pm

  15. Dan Kauffman wrote:

    Looks real nice, loads very quickly and THANKYOU for putting your sidebar on the right instead of the left it makes printing off something from here a lot easier!

    Posted 08 Jun 2006 at 11:46 pm

  16. sadie wrote:

    Akismet is the shiznet.

    Seriously, Commie, have you taken a look inside your mySql database lately? I bet you have 10,000 spams stored inside there, just taking up space. Add another few thousand in SK2 logs, easily. Unless you clean them out regularly, but most people don’t do that.

    Akismet doesn’t store anything in your database. And if you run it by itself, it rocks after a small adjustment period.

    Posted 08 Jun 2006 at 11:52 pm

  17. Pinko Punko wrote:

    It is definitely the +1000 they are getting from the BS granularity check from SK2- it is getting bad.

    Posted 22 Jun 2006 at 1:15 pm

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