As I mentioned on Friday, I had deactivated my spam prevention plugins. It’s been about 60 hours, but all of spam fighting techniques that are built into WordPress are working extremely well.
One thing I noticed however was pingbacks automatically being approved. I had trackbacks moderated by a plugin I wrote, but otherwise they would have been approved also. Since they weren’t from sites in my link list, they should have been going to moderation. Well, this morning I took a browse through the code for 1.5.1 (I’m using the latest and greatest) and I found a bug with pingback and trackback white listing. WP was marking every PB and TB as white listed. It wasn’t ever possible for them to not be white listed, so I fixed the code and submitted a patch. Now I’ve even deactivated my Moderate Trackback plugin since I don’t need it either.
MtDewVirus and 2 Hole Cards are now completely free of all spam prevention plugins. I keep a few there for emergencies, but they aren’t activated at the moment.
If you’re curious about my settings in WP, here they are:
- Anyone can register = OFF
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment = OFF
- An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below) = OFF
- Comment author must fill out name and e-mail = ON
- Comment author must have a previously approved comment = ON
- Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than 5 links.
- Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies = ON
- Comment Moderation words = NONE
- Comment Blacklist words – I do have 7 words listed here. Contact me if you want them.
That’s all there is to it.
Nick Momrik 