Anti-Comment-Spam Plugin

28 May 2007

Non-Technical Summary

I just installed WP Hashcash on my blog to try to get rid of all the spam I've been getting. Hopefully no-one will notice it (except me), but please post some comments and let me know if you have any problems with it. Thanks.

Technical Bit

Akismet catches 99% of spam, but the few that get through are still annoying; and with so many I can't actually check the list for false-positives. I tried just adding a random hash in a hidden field to every post, but it seems the bots do read the HTML (rather than just submitting directly to wp-comments.php) - so that didn't work at all.

This time the hash is computed using JavaScript instead. I don't know of anyone who uses a browser without it (apart from Lynx/Links occasionally when loading a normal browser is too much hassle), so it shouldn't be much of a problem for anyone.

There is, however, some warning being shown by Firebug - "Illegal Character". I don't know why though.

(In other news: I also fixed the XHTML validation errors at last!)