Anti-Spam
Posted: Mon 13 June, 2005 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 6 Comments »Over the week we were away, d4d™ got hit by a bundle of comment spam. As in about 300 comments-worth of spam. It’s a pain in the arse, but it all got deleted on Saturday night.
Anyway, I did some research, and it turns out that the anti-spam tool I was using (Kitten’s “Spaminator”) was broken by WP 1.5 – it had worked in 1.5 beta, but was deeply duff in the full 1.5. Which, in fairness, explained quite a lot. So today I’ve done a bit of a search using the (thanks Gordon) nice new WordPress codex to find new anti-spam stuff.
So now I’m running Spam Karma v2. I had problems with the previous version of Spam Karma, but I thought I’d have a bash with the new, improved version. Also, it’s got an extra plug-in that means I should be able to resurrect any comments that SK has decided were spam even when they weren’t really. However, if your comments don’t appear, drop me a line and I’ll see if I can sort something out.
Oh, and I had to upgrade my installation of WP from 1.5 to 1.5.1 to fix some bugs and so on. Now, Gordon’s been on at me to say that now all the codex etc. is in place, the documentation is better etc., and that I should stop sniping about it. Well, I would, but during the upgrade my WP installation still got confused and went tits-up for about ten minutes. So no, it’s not perfect yet. Luckily this time I was paranoid, and backed up everything before doing owt, so I could resurrect files that WP had decided to “upgrade” to a version that didn’t work with my own intricate noodlings.
I won’t say that WP is necessarily all to blame, because I’ve done a fair amount of work under the hood of d4d™ which WP doesn’t really know about, so it tries to over-write it. But it still bugs me that a “simple” upgrade can then lead on to fifteen extra minutes of fixing the stuff the upgrade has broken…
I also had problems with Spam Karma in its previous incarnation (sorry), but I’ve had a great experience with SK2 and WP 1.5.1. I’ve had a lot of spam attacks recently, but SK has gamely gobbled up the spammy ones silently, without (as far as I can tell) eating any non-spam.
OK OK I’ll stop sniping.
BUT
You can hardly expect an upgrade to go smoothly if you’ve been faffing around in the code yourself – it’s YOUR job to remember what YOU changed. The upgrade will presume (like most others do) that you are using a theme, and haven’t made changes in places you shouldn’t have. And anyway, it’s not the documentations fault!! 😉
(Sorry gotta stick up for my fellow tech authors).
Gordon, I agree – hence the last paragraph of the post. However, I don’t expect an upgrade to change fundamental parts of the page useability, such as reactivating pop-up comments when I have been using in-line comments. Ditto that the pop-up should actually have the comments bit, rather than just posting the post in the pop-up, and then requiring another click to get to the comments. Buggy and fucked up, to be civil about it.
I don’t object to the upgrade messing with bits I’ve messed with. No-one sane expects a software package to be telepathic or all-knowing. However, I do expect it to not fuck with simple bits. Themes was a case in point which just seemingly sprang from nowhere.
And the upgrade instructions may assume that I’m using a theme – but surely I’m not the only WP user who’s adapted my layout and code a fair bit from the standard “out of the box” model? To still be on the “back stuff up, then go to this page. That’s It” upgrade instruction module is, perhaps, optimistic, shall we say?
I agree with Lyle.
Yes I agree it’s overly optimistic.
But from an operations point of view, and for the majority of WP users, it WILL be that simple. Your “out of the box” statement is key here – that’s all they can cater for… I’m sure they willingly accept that many people have tinkered with their install, but I’d also guess that those people are – a. in the minority and b. able to fix any problems the upgrade brings.
So I guess they should have two different upgrades – one “out of the box” and one for “custom applications” (which will just be a long list of changes and manually instructions and will be scary as hell!!) 😉
It seems nothing’s going to stop manual spam though.