This plugin for WordPress 1.5 allows a blog user to safely and easily share the contents of their “moderation keys” and “blacklist” with other trusted bloggers. This method is a very powerful way of disseminating spam identifiers and has been proven to be very effective in preventing comment spam.
Installation is really simple. Just download the file, unzip it and drop it into the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress 1.5 blog. Activate it in your plugin manager and look under Options->Blacklist Peers. There you will find information on the plugin and the Peering interface.
In simple terms, every blog has a unique “Peer ID” that is used to allow other blogs to exchange blacklist and moderation key information with it. This Peer ID can be discretely distributed among trusted peers. A list of all blogs that are in a WordPress blog’s “Links”, and have an XFN relationships defined, are displayed on the Peering page. In order to update your own moderation keys and/or your blacklist from any of these blogs, obtain the Peer ID from the blog owner in question (making sure that they have this plugin installed), paste it in and click the appropriate button. Thats all! Their Peer ID is stored in your blog’s database for future use.
WordPress 1.5 introduced quite a few programming enhancements under the hood (more on that later) and this plugin exploits two of these gems. Some caveats of this plugin include the limitation of peering among WordPress 1.5 blogs (at this time, that I hope, will change) and the ability to selectively filter peers. These are enhancements that are in the works and will be released soon.
Download the Blacklist Peering Plugin for WordPress 1.5
[EDIT] For those that want to try it out but do not have another blog to test it with, here is a something for you to test with. Add http://mindfulmusings.net/desidalal to your links as an XFN “friend” or something and use PeerID 0d45d3c81be5ad88a86daeb07e832878 to update both the blacklist and the moderation keys.
*wow*
Gotta check this, it definitely looks impressive. What’s exciting is that I was precisely wondering how to share data between blogs (about refer spam)
Gonna dive into your code to see what’s there !
This is sweet! I have installed it on my test WP site.
Sounds very interesting, shame I don’t have any other bloggers that use wordpress but it could be a lot of fun.
Mark: Thanks so much! As I administer 70+ installs [four for personal use], this will rule the school for me. 🙂
Mark: There’s something about this plugin that totally clashes with SpamKarma; when both are activated, you can’t get the peering options page to come up; it just shows as a blank. Email me if you’re interested …
Nothing shows up in Option > Blacklist peers. I assume this not the intended effect ?
Any plans to make this a SpamKarma2 plugin to tie in it’s respective blacklists? 🙂
Hey Mark … how we doing on this? 🙂