Comment Spam and Image Authorization
Apparently Project Paradox is growing in popularity. Normally, I’d take this to be a good thing. Unfortunately, it hasn’t managed to attract the sort of attention that I wanted. My site, like many other blogs out there, has become the target of comment spammers, whose sole goal is to spread their seedy links in as many places as possible.
On the bright side, WordPress has enough security to deal with this sort of thing. All one has to do is click an option and all comments must be approved before being posted. This is what I’ve been doing for the past few months, with some gratification I might add, knowing that I was making spammers spin their wheels uselessly. I even went as far as to block the spammers’ IP addresses. Recently, however, the attempts have become much more numerous with random IPs, creating not a little bit of work for me to process it all.
WordPress has come to the rescue again, however. To solve the problem, I went looking for an image authorization plugin and, lo and behold, the open source community did not disappoint. It took some time to install as I wrestled to reverse-engineer the Project Paradox template, as I’ve long since forgotten how I constructed it in the first place. I am happy to say, however, that spammers will now have a much bigger fence to jump if they want to get their links up here.
Will this cause some frustration for my legitimate commenters? I think the difficulty will be minimal, considering the widespread use of security images for this very purpose. If it does manage to cause hair-pulling, I apologize. Still, I think it’s a step in the right direction in making my website a completely spam free zone.