ricketyclick

I’ve installed the Bad Behavior spam filter, which is aimed at automated attacks (see the Comment Policy on the sidebar). It should present no barrier to real commenters. Please let me know via email if it does.

[update]

Wow. It’s only been a few minutes since I installed the filter, and it’s already blocked six spams. I’ll note that Wordpress says that almost 16,000 comments have been marked as spam since ricketyclick’s inception, and I know I didn’t mark them all by hand, so some have been rejected by other methods.

Originally, I wasn’t posting the name of the plugin, for fear of giving out clues to the spammers. Then I realized Bad Behavior announced itself in the page footer, with a Blocked Spam counter. I could turn that off, I guess, but I’m assuming that the BB writers wouldn’t do that if knowing about the plugin substantially increased vulnerability. Anyway, “security through obscurity” is generally a weak approach. Either BB works or it doesn’t.

Thanks to reader S.R. for recommending this plugin.

[update 2]
I installed Bad Behavior at about 2:30 pm. It’s now a little after eight, only five and half hours later. The banner at the bottom of the page shows over a hundred spams blocked. No posts I judge to be spams have shown up in the logs. I’m pretty happy about that.

[update 3]
Twenty-four hours later: 270+ spams blocked. Die, filthy lying thieving scum. Die slow.