blog [mike atlas]

For the first time since I’ve installed WordPress as my blogging tool on this site almost seven months ago, I started recieving comment spams to my entries. I know WP tries its best to hide known URLs but I’m sure there’s some web spiders out there crawling for default WordPress comment text in html pages, so it probably was inevitable that I’d end up being spammed eventually, but at least it took this long so far.

Anyways. I added a simple requirement for comments (for the few real ones I ever recieve anyway) that asks you to enter the word “notspam” into an additional input field. I have a feeling it should jam up any commentbot. Hopefully this is probably a good enough preventitive measure to prevent comment spam here, as I highly doubt and comment bots are sophisticated enough to adapt to unique input fields on specific blogs without human interaction to do the work.

I have a feeling my blog URL is now going to be shared on a “hit list” of WordPress blogs to spam (these things are traded just as gigabytes worth of email addresses are bought and sold on the black market to spammers). At least I know I should be able to implement a simple, dynamic input box requirement, such as simple math questions, like “Answer to X + Y = ?”, where X and Y are some random integer, and the form post handler will check to see if the user did the correct math. Thanks to Pete Lumbis for the idea.

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