Month: February 2005

How I Fight Spam

Any of you who have a WordPress blog know what I’m talking about when I say spam. You get hammered over and over by bots that want to tell you about the wonders of these pills that will give you extra male enhancement or try to lure you to gamble online. But, luckily, there are solutions to solve this problem.

Yes, you could moderate all comments, but that is pretty tedious and I don’t think that I’d ever approve comments. Plus, people like to see their comment right away, so that would just throw them off if they didn’t see it. Luckily, with the advent of 1.5 there are some good built in solutions to help this out. You can:

  • Have users create accounts and their comments automatically get posted when they are logged in.
  • Have a list of words that can be used to nuke comments right away.
  • Do the same thing you did in 1.2.x and just moderate them and delete them when you want to.
  • Download a plug-in to handle spam comments.

Well, a combination of these will be good, but what I did was use a plug-in called Spam Karma. I have had great success with this plug-in. In over the past two weeks that I have had it installed, it has stopped every spam message that has passed over my blog. At some times it stopped 120 spam comments in one hour. To date, it has blocked over 2,500 spam comments in a 2 week span. This is with 0 false positives. Yea, pretty impressive.

But, the question is this, how can you set it up so that so that it works? I’ve heard that people have tried Spam Karma with mixed results, so, I’ll pass along the wisdom that I know and how I set mine up with the idea that it would be able to help you with your comment spam fighting solution. Actually, it is quite simple:

  1. Download and install Spam Karma.
  2. Follow these instructions on how to properly configure SK.

That is exactly what I did to have it operate the way I have it working right now. Of course, your milage may vary, but I still think it is best to try than to not try at all. This will work with 1.2.x and 1.5. So, try it out and let me know what you think. I’ve loved it so far and I hope that it works for those of you that try it too.

Help Along the Way

For many of us that are seniors, we have begun, or will begin soon, our search for employment after we graduate. I’ve been working the career fairs and every avenue that I can to attempt to get an “in” to the job market. It has been proving to be more challenging than I first anticipated, but this journey has been with its benefits as well. I am learning how to better sell my skills to employers and how to present myself as the right person for the job. It has been an experience that I hope will come to fruition soon, but it has not been done alone. Continue reading “Help Along the Way”