By nickel

Quick update to my approach to controlling blog spam… I wrote previously about some of the steps I had taken to reduce spam, but those steps turned out to be too leaky. Thus, I ended up settling on a combination of Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, which is a simple captcha that works really, really well and isn’t hard for legitimate commenters to defeat, and the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin, which verifies that the page from which the trackback originated actually links to the target article. All of this was backed up by SpamKarma 2 to clean up anything that might slip through.

Fast forward a couple of months and everything was working fine. That is, it was working fine until I realized that there hadn’t been any trackbacks or pingbacks at either FiveCentNickel or Raising4Boys in a long, long time despite tons of inbound links. Weird. Something was clearly wrong, but what? Was it the Anti-Spam plugin or the Trackback Validation plugin?

After a bit of investigation I discovered that Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam was at fault — and so was I… As it turns out, there’s a bit of code early on in the plugin that allows you to specify whether or not trackbacks and pingbacks should be allowed, and this was set to ‘false’ by default:

$cas_allowtrack = false;

and

$cas_allowping = false;

Peter has since change the default behavior to allow trackbacks and pingbacks, but I’m still running an older version, so I was intentionally (albeit unknowningly) blocking these. This morning I switched these settings to ‘true’ — hopefully this takes care of things. And hopefully the Simple Trackback Validation plugin does its job. I actually have no idea how well this plugin works since the Anti-Spam plugin was blocking everything before it got to this stage.