Blessed by the Potato

Posting has been light, but I have been spending time on the site lately, just mostly fiddling with the back-end. The spam comments have crept up from nearly 100/day to almost 200/day over the last few months, and that’s just getting ridiculous. I skim the spam filter so quickly to try to get through them all in a decent amount of time that I’ve lost some false positives (sorry to those of you whose legitimate comments were eaten). So I put in a quick javascript check (which you can see now), but that only cut out about 20% of the spam. So I’ve tried a new method I found referred in the wordpress codex, and that cut out about 30% of the spam. So I’m back to the tide of spam I was facing a few months ago — more than I’d like, but a manageable amount.

Most of it comes from the 173.2** range of IP addresses, and I’m tempted to block the entire range in my .htaccess file. But that would also deny access to any legitimate users that might be in that range, and I’d rather deal with spam than accidentally keep actual readers out. One other feature of spam is that it tends to focus on the older posts, and seems to hit only certain ones (I think) so what I’ve been doing is closing comments to posts that are more than a few months old as the spambots find them. If for whatever reason you do want to comment on an old post, you can either email me, or comment on any post that does have comments enabled, and I’ll move it.

Now, part of doing this manually is to continue to learn about how my platform works, and part is because all the modern plug ‘n play spam tools for WordPress are for the newer versions, and I figured it would take less time to hack at the guts of my current install than to try to upgrade to the current version of WP. Maybe that was a mistake, but I’m so used to the way this one works (and it does work for me) that I’m loathe to change it.

I also wanted to create a new archives page that might work better than the current method of sifting through the archives 10 posts at a time by category or date (via the links in the sidebar). I wanted to group the posts by category, then have the full list of post titles under that. I couldn’t quite get it to work, but I do have a simple list of posts under the page BbtP Archives in the sidebar now. The formatting isn’t quite there either, but it works, and I think I’m going to stop wasting time trying to improve it.