So what is up with the spam?
SPAM, it’s gone from a humble potted meat product to something that everyone (except those making it) hates. Wait a second… ok, so it hasn’t changed in thought much, but it has changed in medium. Ok, yes, I kid. I actually do enjoy the SPAM meat product when prepared correctly, but hey, work with me on this one. At any rate, the digital form of SPAM has started to drive me insane. Fortunately thanks to the tools that the stock install of Wordpress provides me, I can easily capture and dispose of most of the spam before it even hits my blog walls. However, there are those slippery buggers that get thru from time to time, so I’m starting to focus on that now.
The next step in this series is to check out plugins that would allow me to fight back against this spam… And so, the first plugin I tested is known as Bot Check, which forces spam authors (at least in theory) to go thru an additional step of verifying a graphic string before allowing them to post random crap on my blog. Great idea, but upon attempt to install, I discovered my host is lacking one of the libraries I need to run it. Sure, I could email them and ask em to enable it… But I’m feeling rather lazy, and should I decide to move hosts, I don’t want to have to carry a huge list of addons I need for them to activate on my account before I can get up and running. So, on to the next option.
Next in line? A rather interesting non-wordpress specific package known as Bad Behavior. What’s it do? Well, I’ll let them explain it…
Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spam bots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spam bots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referrer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.
Sounds pretty cool huh? I thought so. Not only was the installation a BREEZE, but it allows me to log all the bad requests, find out what their doing and how, and even goes as far as to allow me to white list people in the event that they were blocked when they should not have been. All without me really having to modify anything at all in this package. Me like!
What do you know, tried out two packages, and the second one did everything I wanted and more. Not only that, but I get the peace of mind that now spammers will have to fight thru yet another iron curtain to get into my blogs comments. This is very very appealing to me, and I can’t wait to find out how much of an impact this is going to have on my current spam levels. My prediction? I think it’ll help significantly. But only time will tell, and here’s to hoping.
