The Electric Kool-Aid Spam Test

As I said earlier (Lets do the comment jive), I opened my blog for comments without subscription. I also closed down (Captcha’d) the user registrations and .. hoped for the best 🙂

I was afraid I’d be bothered with loads of spam messages or at least Some.. Just like I was before with the fake users. Opening the comments was a big gambit on Akismet and putting a captcha (using Register Plus) on the registration was .. well, I really dont like Captchas 🙂 But I was happy to finaly be able to install a reCaptcha somewhere. & I really love the idea of inputting books that cant be OCR’d in the process 🙂 And I love the fact that I didnt have to put it in the comments part!

So how did that all work out for me? 🙂
The user spam is gone completely. The captcha stops all the bots registering and spares me from regularly deleting a whole bunch of users that might even be legitimate people (though the lot of users with gmail adresses and random names.. arent that hard to filter!) So Hooray for Succes 🙂
The potential comment spam hasnt been a problem either! There is lots of junk coming in – well, not that much, but there Is junk coming in at a steady rate. I’ve been on the Akismet for 20 days now and it reports 49 Spam. Thats blocked spam & there s nothing that actually came through to the site! And I can read it to gloat over what didnt pass 🙂 Although I just discovered a false positive – just right now! But still .. Hooray for Succes 🙂

It worked out fine!

So thanks to WordPress – The great blogging software,
thanks to Akismet – The spectacular WP Anti Spam tool,
thanks to Register Plus – an amazing plugin that allows you to customise the WP user registration
and thanks to the Amazing Recaptcha! – A free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows.

hehe – if that wasnt giving credit where its due. Its just that I was incredibly scared at the whole experiment. And I can hardly believe its working out so well. I’m relieved at not having to clean out the junk users and I’m constantly surprised at the interesting comments – although I seem to lack the time to respond to them properly and timely Tomorrow! 😉 I hope Bert & Guy are having equal success at their comment & captcha experiments!
And damn, I d like a plugin that auto links certain words.. that d be nice. I’m sure that exists too.. For advertisement ease & all that. Although Id be happy if it d auto link friends & sites I often mention.. (preferably even automatically getting the info out of my WP blog links settings..)