New Plugin: (Really) Simple Spam Filter

8 Comments
05 May

A frustrating thing with my blog is that it attracts a huge amount of comment spam. Close to 500 a day (sigh). Akismet catches almost all of these spam, which is great and all that… but then, it becomes impossible for me to check for any legitimate comments that might’ve accidentally got marked as spam. I just don’t have time to spot check the thousands of spam Akismet catches.

So in a bid to help manage all this madness, I wrote a really simple spam filter plugin to just do a hard bounce on the really obvious comment spam (for example, if a comment contains a spammy word like “phentermine”, or is just full of links to spam blogs). The plugin only does three simple checks, but amazingly, that’s enough to block close to 95% of all spam. The remaining 5% get’s weeded out by Akismet, along with whatever remaining anti-spam plugin is installed.

Think of this plugin as a simple “pre-filter” that just weeds out the ridiculously obvious spam. It’s not much, but at least now my spam queue is much more manageable, and I can much more easily check for any comments that got mislabelled as spam.

So if your WordPress blog gets a huge amount of spam, and you’re interested in making this more manageable, try out this plugin and let me know if you find it useful. More information along with download links are available at the official release page >

Posted on Saturday, May 5th 2007 at 10:00 pm
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8 comments

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  3. # cliff May 07, 2007

    Thanks for your great work. May I suggest you put the version number of the plugin (I use Reports) right on manage page.

    I have no idea which version I’m using. Is there an easy way to find out?

    Tks
    Cliff

  4. # cliff May 07, 2007

    Ah ha!

    I see a check version file in the latest version. I’ll install and see what you’ve done.

    Btw: My company has a full-time opening for a top-notch Wordpress programmer. Can be anywhere in the world. Pays well

    Must have phenomenal references and be very responsive. No cloistered types that take days to respond or go missing for hours on end. I don;t care how good they are. This company is fast, nimble, cool and smart.

    Please forward ideas to cliff’at’oneutah.org

  5. # Dan May 11, 2007

    I was wondering what percentage of comments you’ve had that were blocked by Akismet that were actually legit–is it really worth the time to scan for these?

  6. # Joe Tan May 11, 2007

    Hmm yeah, the false positive rate is actually pretty low (Akismet does a great job)…. but hey, every comment counts!

  7. # RT Cunningham May 12, 2007

    I’m waiting for the next version with bated breath. I like NOT having to go through the Akismet spam tab to clear out all the junk. Since I installed the plugin, more than 400 of my spam comments have been blocked by your plugin alone.

    I’m waiting for that feature to plug in more spam words without having to upload the file each time. That’s a royal PIA.

    Good work on it so far, though!

  8. # Joe Tan May 12, 2007

    haha, bated breath huh.

    Well, I have a new version I’m testing right now on this blog… I want to give it a couple days to make sure everything’s working right before I release it. So it should be coming out shortly :)

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