Success Tackling Comment Spam

Two weeks ago I was complaining about the default Akismet Spam Protection that comes installed with Wordpress. It has always been a bit of a pain having to trawl through the spam trap once a week to pick out the odd legitimate comment, so I stopped doing it. After a brief blogging holiday I came back and found a few nice comments rotting away under Spam. I posted a bit of an apology and a complaint and then Keiron suggested I try WP-SpamFree, a Wordpress plugin that he was testing.

It takes a more pro-active approach to spam protection. Rather than act as a simple filter that places spam in the Spam Trap. It completely blocks spam posters and particularly bots from leaving posts. It is really effective at this and means there is no spam to search through at all. Great if you get lots of incoming spam or are just a bit lazy like I am .

Well I’ve tried it out for two weeks, and I can now give it a hearty recommendation. It has managed to block those dodgy russian comments (Anyone else get these?), spam links, and all the other nasty stuff I was getting, and as far as I can tell there are no false positives. My traffic has increased a bit over the last couple of weeks and this plugin has saved me a bit of work, and a lot of headaches, as spam attempts have gone through the roof. So if you hate having to manage spam comments as much as I do, give it a go.

• WP-SpamFree Wordpress Spam Plugin – Powerful Anti-Spam Protection!
  

photo credit: vic15

Comment Spam Trap Troubles

I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning on the site today. One of the things I rarely do is check the comment spam trap. Browsing through it today, I’ve noticed a couple of completely legitimate comments that were incorrectly marked as spam. They are quite old but I decided to approve them. Apologies if one of your comments got caught. I will endeavor to check it as regularly as I can. It seems that Akismet can be a bit overprotective.

On a related note, I’m going to implement a Commenting Policy as Keiron recommends. I’ll put up a page with the complete policy soon, for now refer to Keiron’s Commenting Policy page as I’m going to implement it as it is with maybe a few additions (Hope that’s OK mate?). My only addition is that comments need to be in English, although American and Australian will also be permitted . Apologies to the massive non-english speaking population of the world, but I can’t moderate content that I don’t understand.

I will post the full policy when I’ve finished with the copy and pasting.

Keiron’s Commenting Policy

Site Fixed

photo credit: Last Hero

I think I’ve just about managed to fix the site now. All the old posts and comments have been recovered thanks to Wordpress’ simple export/import tools. The only thing I don’t have is my custom theme, I’ve installed the most up to date version of the old theme and I’ll tweak it as I go along. So everything has turned out nice again.

Now I’m thinking about how I can prevent this from happening again. I can manually backup the site using my host’s tools but I am quite lazy and will no doubt forget. What I really want is a script that I can run on my home server to do a nightly backup. Even better would be to use a source control system like Subversion to backup the whole thing and merge in the changes every night. Anybody out there managed to do anything like this? I’d be interested to know.

My other concern is the general security of the site. I’ve always been a bit relaxed in this regard and I should probably sort this out. File permissions always seem to be cause me hassle, I really need to work out which files need which permissions in a Wordpress install.

Site Under Repair

As you can see the site is a bit broken. A mischievous hacker messed up a load of files on the server and I’m not patient enough to trawl through everything to fix it. Instead of done a clean wordpress install and am going to attempt to recover the old posts. Not sure if this is a wise thing to attempt to be honest, but I like a challenge.

Once everything is back up and running, hopefully with some improvements over the old site. I’m going to get back in the blogging saddle and try and get my updates more regular instead of relying on auto posts from del.icio.us. I know, I’ve been lazy, work and personal life have been a bit hectic.

For now, enjoy the Kubrick theme, and I hope to post again soon.

Merry Whatever

photo credit: Sister72

Christmas is almost here, which means that I have some spare time on my hands at last. The last couple of months have been a bit crazy and I’ve not had much time to keep the site up to date. Hopefully in the new year there will be time to get things back up and running properly and get some of the posts I’ve got in my drafts folder finished.

Until then, have a great Christmas or whatever else you may or may not be celebrating.

Under Construction

photo credit: Michel Filion (aka Mike9Alive)

This site has been up and running for a couple of hours so far. I’ve not done too much work, but I think it’s already looking good. This is of coarse a testament to the amazing Wordpress platform. Installing the software is a breeze! Once that’s done the challenge is really just to find a nice theme and install a couple of plugins to get the functionality you want.

I’ve just installed the magicblue theme which you can find here. As for plugins, I’ve setup Akismet for a bit of spam protection, PhotoDropper to pull in images off Flickr, Sociable for generating a bit of extra traffic and the Twitter Sidebar Widget to show my tweets. With all this, I think I’ve got about all the functionality I need. I’m sure over the coming weeks there will be a lot more changes. I just hope I can add some interesting content to make this a site worth reading.

On a final note. Heads up to Keiron providing the hosting at BetterWebSpace. Setting up the domain was completely hassle free and for very little cost you get a feature packed service. Impressive!

Hello world!

photo credit: law_keven

Welcome to Technoboria. I am Matt Styles and this is my Blog. Here I will be posting my thoughts on everything technology related including the Internet, gadgets, software, programming and anything else I find interesting and want to share with the world. So, if you find something on here that you like, feel free to comment and let me know what you think.