I’ve been spammed
Spam bots have found my blog and my inbox was filled with notifications regarding new comments awaiting moderation. These nasty creatures know how to use insecure proxies found all over the Internet, and submit random messages directly to the posting scripts on WordPress blogs to advertise their own sites (so far, a casino site and a poker site.) And spam is up there among the top 10 things I hate most. Bite me, spammers!!
I had to take action and implemented Gudlyf’s AuthImage plugin which generates a random text in an image. Posters will have to read the text and enter it before submitting the comments, otherwise the comments will be disregarded. I’m also trying to get Skippy’s Comment Authorization plugin to work - this way, posters will receive a link by e-mail and will be able to authorise their own posts. If they provide a valid e-mail address, that is 
Note to readers: if you have your doubts about giving your real e-mail address when commenting to my posts, I assure you that your e-mail addresses will not be collected and sold to spammers, or used in any way that will fill up your inbox with garbage. E-mails will be used so you authorise your own posts automatically (otherwise you’ll have to wait until I authorise them manually) and sometimes to e-mail you back with a “thank you for commenting.” I’m keeping my computer virus-clean and this blog up-to-date so viruses and hacks cannot steal your data either. So, your privacy is safe.
December 17th, 2004 at 7:31 pm
Saw this problem also over at Scott Hanselman. Same solution there also, go figure.
About privacy, I think we’re quite safe.
December 17th, 2004 at 7:51 pm
Yes, the solutions are similar — even web forums have the image verification thing, or other sites’ registration pages. Scott Hanselman’s script is ASP-based and he runs newtelligence dasBlog, that’s why it looks slightly different. The plug-in I used is written in PHP for WordPress.