Introducing the Gatekeeper
One of the reasons for mono’s quarter-long hiatus has been the ridiculous amounts of comment spam that has kept flushing in like a burst sewer gone berserk. I tried various countermeasures, but they were either sadly unsuccessful at stopping said spam, or involved too much hassle to make it worth the while. About to give up and simply do away with comments entirely, I remembered reading about Eric Meyer’s WP-Gatekeeper sometime last year. It was a good idea, but neither fully developed nor available as a plugin at the time. Well, now it is a plugin, and although a release candidate, it seems ready enough to rock and roll:
WP-Gatekeeper is a comment-spam defense plugin for WordPress 1.5. Upon installing it, a challenge will automatically be added to comment forms: “What color is an orange?”. In order to post, the commenter must enter the correct answer. The strength of Gatekeeper is that it allows you to create any number of challenges you like, and picks one at random to insert into the comment form. You can also define your own markup template as well as manually place the challenge in your comment forms, should you so desire.
It would have been nice if questions were showed to new commenters only, but as long as it keeps the spam away I am happy. Besides, my secret plan is to let Mr. Hudson fix this, then blatantly steal his code. I am also toying with the idea to up the difficulty level of the questions, to something along the lines of “What is the difference between the special and the general theory of relativity?”, just to keep the riffraff away. We will see what happens. Of course, the problem of trackback spam will remain unsolved, but for some reason I haven’t seen much of that. Yet.
Update: Gatekeeper 1.5 rc3 fixes an issue with trackbacks/pingbacks.
11 Comments (skip to form)
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Rob Mientjes
Comment on June 13, 2005 at 11:00 pm
Lame excuse!
Spam is more than just a problem. Oh so sad. Does it work well for you? I might want to get it if it stops more than 600 a day for you…
Mr Hudson
Comment on June 14, 2005 at 6:22 am
I would consider using it (or something like it) IF I had a spam problem - but I don’t - one of the many benefits (ok, the only benefit) of not being indexed by search engines.
And BTW, the insertion of the question code has buggered up your tab-index for the comment form FYI.
Good to see you back…
Lars Holst
Comment on June 14, 2005 at 10:57 am
Rob, I haven’t had a single instance of comment spam since installing the plugin two days ago, so yes, I have to say it works very well. So far.
Mike, I mean, uh, Mr Hudson…Sir…yeah that is probably the only advantage, but a big one at that. I have fixed the tabindex, thanks.
Adam Bramwell
Comment on June 17, 2005 at 1:18 pm
Excellent to hear from you again, here’s to more time dealing with the fun things in life.
Blair Millen
Comment on June 17, 2005 at 2:28 pm
Welcome back Lars… fully refreshed I hope?
Jeff Wheeler
Comment on June 18, 2005 at 9:30 pm
Seems to work great, and I’ve seen this long before now, but I never knew it had the capability to add form elements. I’m impressed!
Jeff Wheeler
Comment on June 18, 2005 at 9:31 pm
What happens if you give the wrong answer?
Lars Holst
Comment on June 18, 2005 at 10:07 pm
Adam and Blair, thanks. Having stayed away from weblogs for a while, I suppose I do feel a bit refreshed. Which is nice. But I also feel a sense of aloofness, which is a mixed feeling because most of the stuff I used to care about has lost its value to me. Which makes this something of a new start, I guess.
Jeff, you can also define your own markup through the admin interface, and then use a predefined tag to include it exactly where you want. Very useful. Wrong answers just lead to a very unspectacular WP comment error page. I could customize it to be a little more informative.
Jonathan Holst
Comment on June 18, 2005 at 11:16 pm
Excellent Lars. I was beginning to wonder if I was the only Holst left
seriocomic
Comment on June 27, 2005 at 1:00 pm
Seems like this plugin is doing the trick…
http://www.ioerror.us/software/bad-behavior/
Lars Holst
Comment on June 29, 2005 at 11:06 am
Jonathan, don’t forget about the restraint collector guy
Mike, thanks. Installed. Will evaluate and report back.