After my first post today I apparently triggered some insidious bot lurking in a dark corner of the Interweb: within 45 seconds of bringing my blog back from the dead I got over 200 spam comment submissions, mostly to old posts. More distressingly, 180 of them sailed right past the spam filter. All of them were about gambling. As a result, to prevent me getting repetitive stress disorder from hitting the “mark as spam” button and keep this blog easy to comment on without requiring registration or anything intrusive, I’ve banned the following three words from comments: poker, casino, and gambling. I don’t anticipate anyone needing to use them, but if for some reason you do you may want to write c@sino or you’ll have your post discarded transparently.
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People are Googling for patio11 blog due to the amount of time I spend posting under that name.
Patrick,
I’ve had the same issues, but instead of enforcing registration, I just installed a captcha plugin into my WordPress blog. It’s trivial to install, and completely removed my blog spamming problem (now to do something about the email crap coming in).
You can download the plugin from here (it’s called Anti Spam Image):
http://nio.infor96.com/archives/369
I have the same problem with my contact web form. It’s spammed a lot.
I run Spam Karma 2 on my WP blog. Eliminates all the spam… it’s a plugin.
However, I don’t know if you can use it with WordPress.com… but you can try the Akismet system. That should work with WordPress.com fine.
Patrick,
A coincedence perhaps, and certainly not the iSV concerned fault, but one of the 30 Dayers is working on software that relates to one of the words you’ve added to your banned list. A connection?
That was a very, very good catch. I’ve decreased the amount of negative attention WordPress will pay to that topic — should he want to discuss poker I’ll have to manually approve the comments, but its better than getting them poofed transparently.