Testing Weapons of War

By Cyrris

From an outsiders perspective, and even somewhat from my own, Aelon’s ability to protect itself against spam has, for a while now, been quite good. Over the past few months, barely a handful of spam comments have made it on to the site, and even they were detected and removed almost instantly. This has all been thanks to WordPress’ good protection, despite a few legitimate posts ending up in the moderation queue thanks to my draconion list of trigger words.

Further behind the scenes, however, it’s becoming a pain. Multiple spam comments are caught every day, and each needs to be manually checked by me to ensure it’s not a legitimate post. It only takes a few seconds each time, but this does get arduous. More concerning (to me at least) is that spammers have also effectively destroyed Aelon’s referrer logs, and have wasted a lot of our bandwidth which to me is unacceptable .

As such, I have as of today authorised the use of a WordPress plugin called Bad Behaviour. It has been demonstrated successfully elsewhere, and promises to neutralise both comment and referrer spam threats. However, with this new weapon (as virtually any) comes a small risk of friendly fire. If you ever find yourself blocked by this plugin, please let me know immediately. The fact is, every legitimate commenter here is standing directly in the firing range of this new weapon, and if anyone gets hit, I need to know so I can make sure it doesn’t happen again. If casualties become unacceptably high, I’ll be taking it down, but otherwise I would love to see if it delivers.