Lots of people are talking about turning off Akismet for a day to see how much work it actually does. I think that’s mental!
I am inclined to think that it would be better to use an altered version with some kind of logging function so you get the stats without having to spend 24-36 hours de-spamming your comments.
I am considering it though, but for a different reason.
I am quite interested in preventing the spam in the first place, rather than dealing with it once it arrives, and so have been experimenting with ideas for a little while. I am running something experimental at the moment just to see what effect it has. Turning off Akismet would give me a greater challenge, but I’m slightly scared in case it goes wrong.
One thing I have found is that it is particularly difficult to intercept spam before it gets processed by WordPress. For my current experiment I needed to be able to alter the Post variables before they were used by WordPress. I have actually had to change some of the core files to allow this as the only way to deal with it totally via a plugin is to let the comment happen, and then roll it back with it after the fact.
That seems slightly odd to me, so perhaps I have missed something.
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Janis,
I did consider the fake field option. It’s been going around for a little while and when I have used it, it has worked well.
In this instance though I wanted to see how things would go with just this one interception technique on its own.
At the moment it is pretty easy to get around if someone really wanted to but I working on that.
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Is your experiment by any chance similar to what I did recently?
You might also be interested in the Comment Spam Trap plugin (it uses preprocess_comment).
P.S.
Okay, I looked at the page source, I can see what you’re doing ;)
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I had a quick look at Bad Behaviour and it looked like a Javascript based validation solution. I didn’t have much time to look in depth unfortunately.
That is certainly one way to add additional protection.
I think Spam Karma rolls the comments back as well.
I have found that there is a pre-process filter hook: preprocess_comment
This lets the comment data be filtered before it is added to the database.
Unfortunately it is still a little too late to alter the post variables.
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SpamKarma2 is also quite good, and while it does process everything, it gives you numbers. :) And inserts a foot saying how many it snagged.
I’m also currently trying out a trifecta of smaller spam-stoppers on a medium-sized WPMU install.
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dealing with spams waste a lot of time for me too.
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I haven’t looked at Bad Behaviour, but I will. Thanks Andrea.
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Doesn’t Bad Behaviour stop most spam before it gets processed? that’s how I thought it worked. Haven’t tried it much; just going by what a few users have said.