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Upgraded to Wordpress 2.2

So, I’ve just upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.2 because of a tremendous amount of spam lately. But the upgrade didn’t seem to solve the problem entirely, so I’ve also added a stupid question to be answered when commenting - sorry about that.

To give you an idea of the amount of spam blogs like this is experiencing - the filtered spam count today has been more than 150, and my blog has in total filtered more than 83000 spam comments… (you can see the current spam count on the sidebar)

Please let me know if anything is broken.

Have a nice day folks :)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 15:29:45 and is filed under GNU/Linux [in English], Generell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “Upgraded to Wordpress 2.2”

  1. HAL 9000 Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 18:56:01

    But Martin?! Answering the stupid question when leaving a comment doesn’t really confirm with 100% certainty that the comment was posted by a human user.

    Not only because designing a good Turing test is very difficult, nor because there may be some overlap between what a human can do, and what a computer can do (that’s certainly true for humans and bears, see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html ), but also because spammers are getting around these tests by harvesting a practically-free resource on the Internet: the desire to see pornography: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39153933,00.htm

    I think you should change the phrase “This confirms you are a human user!”

  2. Martin Says:
    May 21st, 2007 at 20:52:27

    HAL 9000: I totally agree! But it was a really cheap way of getting rid of spam (for now), as I just used a free plugin for Wordpress.

    Using humans to teach spam bots how to answer these questions is really smart. Maybe we could make a noise bot, that will fool the porn based harvesters? Hm, it’s a war out there - but I still very much prefer to manually kill some spam comments now and then, instead of having to pay some extra Internet tax.

    Anyway - I might hack the plugin and remove that stupid “This confirms…”. :-)

  3. Martin Says:
    May 26th, 2007 at 10:33:05

    Wow, I think this is the way to do it: using the Internet to correct OCR mistakes. It’s a win-win. Wonder if it is available for Wordpress.

  4. Martin Says:
    July 6th, 2007 at 07:50:43

    I just installed reCAPTCHA. I had to hack it a little to make it generate valid html. This is a test comment.

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