Above the Fold: The Blog

Today I logged into my computer after not checking my abovethefold emails for a few days because it was too darned hot to even think about turning on a computer that would pump hot air into my room for hours. It was not a good sight to see twenty comment notifications from this blog arrive, all of them spam. Four of those arrived in the space of six hours this morning. Wordpress has no filters built in for this stuff, but this is where the beauty of plugins comes in.

I thought about getting a plugin that would add one of the captcha picture tests to the comment page. It’s a useful way of filtering out the spam bots on registration forms and password retrievers for Yahoo!Messanger (although I’d argue that Y!M has got their capcha things set to be much too viscious) but seemed too fiddly and unwelcoming for a blog. I also considered setting this blog to only allow comments from registered users, but that’s definitely overkill. What I looked for was something that would filter out the spam, enable me to check the filters every few days in case it caught legitimate comments and only use captcha if the comment is borderline and needs further verification. It should be completely invisible to real users - ensuring this blog is accessible and usable.

As an experiment I’ve downloaded and installed Spam Karma 2 to start dealing with this because it filled all those requirements and gave me more control than I thought I’d get. In the three hours it’s been installed, it’s caught three pieces of spam already and none of that hit my inbox. Score!

Of course, the really interesting bit will be seeing whether real comments get through so I’m always happy to have some experimenters.

I had a post in my head about the death of free content on the Internet and possibly a Chicken Litten type story on a recent LiveJournal kerfuffle, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. I need to get the hot air box turned off!