Letter Never Sent

After I logged in to discover 152 friendly (”Great site! Ci@lis!”) spam comments from Cialis and online poker sites, I had to move to a new solution for fighting comment spam. It seems the spammers circumvented my previous solution and implemented it into whatever scripts and tools they use to troll the vast blog geography. Luckily, due to the open source nature of Wordpress there were several available solutions for preventing automated comment spam through the use of ‘captcha‘ images. There was one Wordpress plugin, SecureImage, that stood out due to its simple drop-in functionality. You just throw the plugin into your Wordpress plugin directory and activate it. You must also have the ImageMagick module installed on your server, which is usually the case. If not, it’s an easy install. I had to make one change to the plugin script since it was not detecting the presence of ImageMagick’s convert utility. If you have the same problem, simply comment out the section where the script checks for the location of convert. To see the captcha script in action, try to leave a comment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 9:21 am and is filed under Cool Tools, General, Software / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.