Preemptive Strikes Against Blog Spam
Blog spam is a pain. It wastes your time, your bandwidth and storage space. Kyle asked today on Twitter for some advice on how to reduce spam loads. Here are some plugins and code I’ve used to reduce spam on my blogs.
Akismet
This plug-in does a very nice job of marking spam and is set-it-and-forget-it easy. You’ll need a Wordpress API key and installation and setup is a snap. Akismet will quarantine comments and trackback pings in a special area so that you can either mass delete them or go through them and check for false positives. I’ve seen some false-positives on trackbacks. You can use Akismet with Wordpress as well as several other systems, including Movable Type.
Bad Behavior
A great way to stop bots from spamming you is to not even let them on your site. Bad Behavior does just that. If you don’t use Wordpress, you can still integrate the code with your PHP-based web app. I once got blocked from visiting a site by BB because I was using a Playstation3. I think BB didn’t like my user-agent.
ReCaptcha
ReCaptcha is a cool project out of CMU. I’ve been meaning to do a whole post on it, but I use it at my institution to reduce spam and it works great. Bad people stay out and as a byproduct, books are being digitized. You can learn more about there here. There is a Wordpress plugin as well, as well as resources for a large number of other content systems and programming languages.
Spam Firewall
One of the issues with Movable Type is that everything runs as a CGI process. This means if your blog or site runs MT, and you have open comments, your mt-comments.cgi script is going to be slammed. This means higher loads on your server, which in turn can lead to degraded performance, and worse, if your site is hosted in a shared environment, can get your blog turned off. My MT scripts are constantly getting killed at Dreamhost. Spam Firewall serves as a gate-keeper for your mt-comments.cgi script by trying to thwart off would-be intruders before they even get in. This plugin is only for PHP-based installs.
I hope this helps you reduce the spam on your blog.
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Wordpress 2.5 Released
I’ll be honest - I’ve been a Movable Type guy since, what, 2000? I’ve been blogging with it at home for that long, and we use it at Allegheny as well. It’s always worked and their version 4 software has been nice.
When I first had the idea for this site, I wanted to use it as a learning opportunity and decided to use Wordpress as the blogging platform. Thanks to Dreamhost’s one-click install, I was up and running in moments.
Thus far, I’m very, very impressed with Wordpress. It’s so easy to use and customize, and the thing I enjoy the most are the plug-ins. What was tough to do in MT is so easy in WP. There are plug-ins for just about everything and I’ve tried a bunch including one to handle RSS feeds and send them to Feedburner, one for making SEO stuff a no-brainer, and one to publish Google sitemaps automatically.
This weekend, Wordpress released version 2.5 of their software. Again, it was a simple upgrade thanks to Dreamhost and so far, things have just worked. The interface has been refined and things have been made a bit more simpler. All around, a great update. I’m sure there is a ton of work that’s been done in the guts of the application, and I think over the next few days I’ll try to explore those more.
The more I use WP, the more I wonder if it could be used as a CMS for a school. It’s so much easier to use then content management systems I’ve looked at (and I’ve been looking lately). A platform like the Wordpress MU seems to have a lot of CMS features built-in: mutliple authors, permissions, blogging and editing “pages.” Are any campuses out there using Wordpress as a CMS? It’s certainly a cost-efficient solution.
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