Lose, Lose, And Draw
So this blog was hit with a couple comment spam this past weekend. Those bastards. I knew it was going to happen eventually, nothing against WP Hashcash, it’s doing its job quite perfectly.
A new threat, Trackback and Pingback comment spam. Trackbacks and Pingbacks are just a way for other blogs to link to your blog. It’s a good idea, it connects similar topics from different blogs and they show up in your comments. Alas WP Hashcash only works with regular comments. There are a couple solutions to the new spam though:
- Disable Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Enable moderation on ALL comments
- Add a new spam plugin that rates comments, giving them a score
- Install a Trackback/Pingback moderation plugin
I didn’t want to disable trackbacks/pingbacks. No way was I going to enable moderation again, since it delays posts from appearing on the site (it waits for my approval). I didn’t really want to do a spam-score based plugin, since you can get false positives/negatives. I ended up installing 2 plugins from the same author, Trackback and Pingback Moderation.
So now all comment posts should be as they were before, no change, but Trackbacks and Pingbacks will go into a moderation queue waiting for my approval. Which is fine, I’m sure the delay in Trackbacks and Pingbacks isn’t that big of a deal.
7 Responses to “Lose, Lose, And Draw”
I tried to Trackback on this entry from my last post. I don’t know if it worked. That way, I can see what a Trackback is and you can test your new plugin. Can you approve it, please, just so I can see how it comes out. Thanks.
No trackback here, I wonder if it’s a plugin problem or a problem on your end. Do you have “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)” under Options->Discussion checked?
Yes I do have that option checked. I’m not allowing trackbacks to mine though. Also, I just put under URI Trackback, the URL for this post. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to do that?
why not use blogger?
Well Deeds’ Pingback worked, BUT the moderation plugin did not, didn’t get an email or anything asking for confirmation of the Pingback, bah! I think it’s because I’m running WordPress 1.2.x instead of 1.3/1.5. 1.5 just came out a couple days ago and 1.3 never got out of testing (1.4 doesn’t exist), so I guess this weekend I’m doing an overhaul of the blog (hopefully it won’t be too tough, but then again, 1.5 does templates a TOTALLY different way, ugh).
As for not using Blogger, well, I don’t know about Deeds, but I’m pretty anal about anything techie (hence not using Outlook or Plaxo or Internet Explorer, etc etc). I like to have TONS of options and configurability and want to learn and manage my site according to what I want and to make mistakes on the way too obviously. Blogger doesn’t allow me to do that.
Deeds should switch, shes a girl, girls can’t use computers…or drive.
D's Deeds » Trackbacks - February 23, 2005
[...] 17;t do anything. Whatever. I’ll just have to follow TB’s instructions on this post. In the mean time, I’ll be getting stupid quotes about family members dying from fre [...]
Dude, you just said, though implicitly, that Casey’s a girl.
Anyway, maybe I shouldn’t program though. Man, I had a bug that I fixed, and then it showed up again as some other error. I looked at the code and man, my fix was horrible! It must’ve been just for testing, and for some reason, I forgot to actually fix it. And the people in England were the ones who noticed it! I’m an idiot.
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