An updated version of the Three Strikes Spam Plugin, now in version 1.1 Beta, is available for download. I started to receive a few Spam comments yesterday and I realized that the built in WordPress “Common Spam Words” filter does not account for encoded information. In other words, if a spammer encodes the contents of the comment, URL etc, it does not get caught as spam (though some items will get caught). This new version of the plugin uses a function that acts like the Javascript unescape command (in PHP) and decodes encoded entities. The php function, and consequently, the Three Strikes plugin, will check for Unicode and ASCII characters, convert them to plain letters and characters (unencoded) and then run the spam checker on this information. I will be working on implementing this within Kitten’s Spam Words plugin as well. Download the new plugin from here. Installation and upgrade […]