Over the last few days, I’ve noticed a few spam comments slipping by SpamKarma2. At least a few of the bastards seem to have figured out a way around the javascript payload test. These have all been direct comments, not trackbacks or pingbacks. SK2 still works pretty well, as it’s catching about 20+ spams for each one it allows through, so I’m thinking about supplementing SK2 with WP-Gatekeeper.
I had some trouble with Gatekeeper earlier, but I think it was primarily due to the fact that I have multiple themes on my blog. (I also saw a note in the Gatekeeper changelog about a bug that blocked trackbacks and/or pingbacks in the version I was using.) I’ve upgraded Gatekeeper to RC4, and I’m going to disable the theme switcher (and my other themes). Then I’ve got to hard-code a call to Gatekeeper’s challenge routine in my comment form(s).
Sounds like a job for this weekend, since it’ll probably take a few hours to get all this done. God, I hope that You have a special circle of Hell set aside for spammers!
I read a post today on Nicholas’ blog which indicated that he was having trouble commenting on my site. I’ve had other commenting problems (1, 2) in the past which have been traced to my spam-blocker, WP-Gatekeeper. I haven’t spent any effort on the current problem, I’m just assuming that gatekeeper is at fault, so I disabled this plugin and installed Spam Karma 2 since Nicholas seems to be getting good results with it. I’m not sure what Joseph is using nowadays, but gatekeeper may be doing the trick for him–I found out a few days ago that he hand-rolled his crisp minimalist theme, and perhaps gatekeeper plays well with such a setup.
I’ll run with Spam Karma 2 for a while and see how it goes. I hate to think that people might have tried to post comments here, failed, and given up on this blog. I really have no idea how many people read the crap I post, but I know there are at least a few people out there with too much time on their hands. 
I’m wondering if the known bug in gatekeeper 1.5 depends on which theme you’re running? I’m running journalized-blue, and it was rejecting comments with “Sorry, posting has been closed for the time being.” errors.
I’m running Eric Meyer’s gatekeeper anti-spam tool. He has one known bug listed, where the auto-challenge feature doesn’t always insert the challenge in the comment form. I had tested this when I first installed the software, and it worked at the time, so I forgot about it. Then I added a bunch of themes to my site. I started getting a few complaints from people, saying that comments were closed, so I went and checked all my settings–all my comment settings looked correct, so I was stumped. Until I remembered about that known bug…
I found that my journalized-blue theme was rejecting comments from non-registered users. I added an explicit call to gatekeeperposechallenge() per this suggestion on Eric’s page.
I put the following code in the journalized-blue theme comments.php, between the email and text inputs:
if (functionexists(’gatekeeperposechallenge’)) {
gatekeeperpose_challenge(”,3); // default format string, tab index==3
}
(Need I mention that this needs to be wrapped with php tags?)
I have the theme switcher installed and several themes available, so I’ll log out and try to comment on this post anonymously with each of my themes.
Joseph and I have been testing WordPress’s pingback and trackback features, neither of which were working for either of our blogs. After flipping a whole bunch of options on and off, we determined that the culprit was WP-Gatekeeper. (This is not intended as a slam on Eric Meyer, who does excellent work!) Joseph is digging into Eric’s code as I type up this entry, so hopefully a patch will be on its way to Eric ASAP.
The diagnosis of this problem was greatly simplified by RedAlt’s Ping-o-mation tool. Multajn gratulojn!
Well, I finally got on the blog bandwagon. I was interested in blog software which supported pingback and trackback, and which I could install on Pair’s systems without root access. After checking out a few packages, I settled on WordPress.
Anti-spam plugins that I’ve bolted on include Farook’s WPBlacklist and Meyer’s WP-Gatekeeper. I wasn’t able to get the blacklist to use URI updating, due to “URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” error, so I just browsed the blacklist and saved the contents locally. This will need to be manually updated from time to time :(, but it’s a reasonable start.
After browsing Joseph Scott’s blog, I decided to supplement the category system by adding Felix Wong’s WP-Tags plugin.
I decided to leave the blog timezone set to UTC, since I live in the Pacific timezone while my server’s timezone is 2 or 3 hours ahead of me.
