New spam filter
I’ve just installed Joe Tan’s Simple Spam Filter plugin. This is an extra line of defence which works alongside Akismet. The best thing is that it uses reCAPTCHA, but only for comments that are flagged as spam by the simple spam filter itself or by Akismet. That means that most legitimate comments will get through without having to jump through any hoops, but if the filters wrongly flag your comment as spam you get the chance to enter a CAPTCHA code (and reCAPTCHA offers an audio alternative if you can’t read the text). If you get it right the comment appears straight away. If you get it wrong the comment is automatically deleted. This should mean that I won’t have to waste any more time looking for false positives, and most commenters won’t have to waste any time solving CAPTCHAs.
[Edit: to make it work properly you might need to download and install a new version of Akismet. You need at least version 2.1.2 (the latest is 2.1.3) but as I haven't upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 I still had an old version which I needed to replace manually]
Comment by Joe — 1:49 pm, 21 January 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for the mention and link!
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 5:31 pm, 21 January 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
No problem. It’s a great plugin. Using CAPTCHAs only for suspected spam is a brilliant idea. Most people seem to have been thinking in terms of either CAPTCHAs or Bayesian filtering but combining them this way gets the best of both worlds.