I have been working with the centralized comment spam prevention idea for some time and I have a service ready to be tested. It is in the alpha stages of development but the focus is on a simplified interface, incredibly simple installation and ZERO maintenance.
Now a lot of developers and blog gurus poo poo the centralized idea since any central system WILL be vulnerable. However, if centralization itself is distributed, that is, if a hundred people can provide spam protection for a hundred thousand, the vulnerability becomes less of a problem. In the present incarnation of this service, you install a WordPress (various other tools planned) plugin and enable it. Everything else is taken care of for you. The service learns from itself and the more spam you send its way, the better it gets.
Lots of features are planned and some are already implemented. What I am looking for are about a hundred alpha testers with the worst comment spam symptoms. During the testing period things might break horribly (well not really, just comments will be snafu’ed), and you might have to endure frequent updates, but you might very well be free of comment spam, and in the process help create something useful (and make me happy!).
So if Cialis and Viagra haunt you in your morning coffee or if you do not care for the texas-holdem person, (and are willing to be a blog guinea pig), leave a comment here with your blog name and email address (never visible) and I will send you the download link.
If you are a developer with a blog tool beside WordPress (or even a WP hack/dev) and would like to see the insides of the web service, let me know.
[EDIT]: There are no dangers really. If this plugin somehow stops responding and visitors cannot comment on your blog, you would have to manually turn off the plugin (and enable any other comment spam system you might have) Thats all.
This is a test comment. Make sure you do not include the words which could make you go Hmmmm…
I have several plugins that have pretty much taken care of my spam problem, but, if I can consolidate it to a single plugin and not have to modify too much WordPress core code…That’d be awesome!
My blog is http://www.justasimpleonlinenerd.com
I’d be willing to test (I get comment spam more or less daily now) but I’d like to know more about the risks before I take the plunge 🙂
It would be great if you could somehow find a way to work with the Comment Spam Clearinghouse but that would probably be impractical.
I’d like to help test. Painless and centralized? Sign me up!
I’ve got it running over at surfiOnline and all seems to be running well. As Mark warned me, there is a slight “lag” when posting comments because it has to connect to the central server, but its nothing major.
The round robin DNS idea which someone came up with on IRC last night would also be pretty awesome if we could manage to get it set up. The only problem then is making sure each mirror has the latest copy of the keywords list. Possibly a cron to update across all mirrors every few hours?
Anyway, well done Mark. Awesome idea for a plugin. 🙂
Send it my way, please 🙂
I want one, too! 🙂
I have it going on my site and I didn’t notice any lag at all. How do I even know its working, Mark?
I’m getting 20+ spam comments daily, even with other plugins running, so I’d definately be interested in this.
Send a copy my way thanks ;]
I’m interested.
I get 50+ spams some day. I am fighting a losing battle. I have about a 99% noise ratio, in other words, I get very few real comments, so I have very little to lose. Send me the plugin and I will be happy to test and to provide code if I can (I wrote the LivePress plugin for WordPress).
I’d like to test it, please
I’m interested in testing and possibly being part of the distributed network.
I’ve got a b2 type blog, i’m trying to fight the damn spammers -_- please help!
My website isn’t exactly a blog, but an article archive where people can post their articles in 20 categories. I haven’t had a lot of traffic yet, but I am sure when it takes off, I will bombarded with spam messages just as much as the everyday blogger. The help would be very much appreciated.
I’d be happy to help you test this if this is still going on
I’m looking for a megaton of SPAM to go my way. Feel free to SPAM the following accounts:
curly@csat.binc.net
moe@csat.binc.et
curly@csat.binc.net
moe@csat.binc.net