Anti-spam measures

Today I’ve installed Dr Dave’s Spam Karma 2 plugin to protect against comment spam on our WordPress blogs. We’ve had a number of spam comments reported over the last week or so. This is the price of moving to a more popular blog platform, I guess. This wasn’t an issue with the eZpublish blogs, which didn’t attract spam at all.

The Spam Karma 2 plug-in is sophisticated, and judges what’s likely to be spam by using a range of factors. These include, for example.

  • Is the commenter a member of the Exc-el Edublogs community?
  • Are there a lot of hyperlinks in the comment? (often a characteristic of spam)
  • How long were they on the post before commenting?

There are many more factors. If the system gets suspicious, it may ask for a captcha to be completed.

If you’ve got an Exc-el blog and have been affected by comment spam, let me know what difference you notice. It should now be protecting all of them. There’s a huge range of settings that can be tweaked if necessary.

Autistic bloggers

At Ollie‘s invitation, I set up a couple of blogs for two autistic S1 students at Musselburgh Grammar School. Today was their chance to get started, and I was interested to see how things went. How would they get on with WordPress? Would there be some difficulties we hadn’t foreseen?

Continue reading Autistic bloggers