Several people have had problems commenting recently. I’m guessing that the issue is that I recently added the word “Successful” to my blacklist, because I was getting so much spam from malicious morons using that as a user name. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t distinguish between strings from user names and content, so that was probably the problem that commenters were having. I’ve removed it, and we’ll see if that solves the problem. Unfortunately, it will recreate the problem with my moron spammers.
As an aside, I have to say that I’m very unhappy with WordPress’ inherent comment-spam-blocking system. It seems to me that multiple comments to multiple posts from the same IP in a few minutes should be automatically blocked, or at least held, but it doesn’t seem smart enough to do even that. MT, for all its flaws, could do that years ago. I have to look into a better solution.
I hate to go to a captcha system, but that may be the only solution. I’ve always wanted to make commenting here relatively painless, but apparently the spammers are going to ruin it for the rest of us, as they have with email.
[Monday morning update]
OK, per advice in comments, I’ve added the WP-Spamfree plugin. We’ll see how it goes.
Thanks for tracking this down. It makes sense, each of my blocked posts was distinguishing between s*cc*ssf*l” and failed infrastructure. Could you announce the list of spam-filtered words? That way I’ll know what the problem is next time and use a thesaurus to fix it. In this case “productive” or “flourishing” or similar would have worked almost as well as “s*cc*ssf*l”.
BTW, “s*cc*ssf*l” is still apparently being blocked as I’ve had to add the “*” to make it show up.
Rand,
Have you tried the ‘Akismet’ wordpress plugin?
Akismet catches most spam. I’m not entirely happy with the way it works though — I’ve had a few (fortunately, very few) normal comments get stuck in the queue, which means I don’t dare just delete all the spam, I have to look at it to make sure no one’s comments get held up. Still, it’s better than nothing.
Spammers forced me to go to captcha on my blog my reader accepted it and it works fine.
I ended up writing a MovableType anti-junk plugin that lets you match on specific fields such as commentor name (plus one to automatically ban IP addresses that generate multiple junked comments). It has worked quite well for me but neither has been a particularly popular plugin. That implies few people find the functionality useful which is likely why it’s not available for WordPress.
My advise, if it is possible, is that you subscribe to some sort of spam blacklist so you do not have to manually update it. Otherwise, use a captcha.
Not sure how you can add user feedback supported bayesian filtering to MovableType tough.
Considering the spam problem I had when I was blogging — before I started using CAPTCHA, and added moderation of unregistered commenters — I’d really hate to imagine what things would have been like if it had been a higher-traffic site.
Eh, sorry, you said you are using WordPress. From what I see a lot of people use Akismet or Spam Karma 2 for spam filtering.
Rand,
I think most of us comment elsewhere and use the captcha system. I’d say try that to eliminate the spammer(s). Make it easier for yourself. Anyone too lazy or dumb to fill in the required block, is probably also for fee cheese and Obamacare.
Rand,
Have you heard of WP-Spam free plugin? It’s better than Askimet as it allows humans to comment while blocking the bots.
I’ve used it on my sites, with the only side effect being…spammers are hiring humans to spam my threads now. Sigh.
Here is the link to it on WP plugin site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-spamfree/
For the record, CAPTCHA’s are no longer effective as spammers have found a way to “read” those funky word puzzles and comment anyways. Sad but true.
The same goes for math problems as well.
Fee cheese: awesome.
Akismet has been pretty solid for me, once I got it set up. But I don’t have THAT much traffic on any of my blogs.
So, do we repost the blocked comments or can you salvage them out of the ‘catched’ file that told us we had already made that comment when it wouldn’t let them through?
You need to repost. Most of them weren’t even in the moderated queue — just blocked.
Make that f-R-e-e cheese, Al.
It’s only f-e-e cheese if you’re one of the one’s paying taxes.
Yes, but that’s why it was funny.
You know it’s fee cheese, I know it’s fee cheese, but the “loyal opposition” just thinks all R’s are rrrrracist, and thus probably can’t tell the difference between feedom and freedom anyway.