Comment Moderation

Personal

I have no idea what is going on with my site, but for some reason things feel wonky. My site’s load time has been pretty shoddy today; Loading up my entries takes forever, and askimet seems to be failing miserably.

I’ve been receiving comment spam every minute, since 10am this morning and Akismet hasn’t caught a single on of those. Somehow they all got approved. I have this inkling that a plugin I activated (then later deactivated) had some cataclysmic effect. I’ve probably deleted well over 100 comments that were spam, and somehow got approved despite not having an e-mail address.

For now until I find a suitable method of “protection” (I really don’t want to go the way of captcha) I have now set up comments to be moderated if the comment author is not already in the database (and approved.) So if you’re a new visitor to my website and you leave a comment, don’t fret. When I see it, I will approve it immediately!

11 Comments

  2. *equally tests the comments* I should be in the database, so here’s hoping I get through!

    On a side note, I think it’s annoying that the “Notify me of followup comments” toggle is checked by default. Do you know that’s something most of your commenters want?

  3. Sarah, that’s hard-coded into the plugin that’s used for subscriptions. You can just uncheck it if you don’t want to be notified.

  4. That’s kinda odd. Do you know which plugin did it? Hope you can fix it. It would suck if you had to keep your comments on mod indefinately.

  5. It’s not a plugin at this point; I’ve been going through the MySQL tables to try to find a culprit, but so far it’s just not really solving any problems. If anything, I might just get rid of all extra tables and keep the main ones (categories, pages, posts, comments) and enter them into a new database to see if that might solve some of the problems.

    I don’t mind the comment moderation that much.

  6. I hope you will find a solution! Moderating all of the time gets tiring – especially if most of it is obvious spam. I have never experienced problems with Akismet though.

  7. To reply to your comment to Sarah, I do believe that there’s a way to remove the default checkmark somewhere. It’s either in the plugin code itself or the code snippet to past into your comments.

    I say that if the problem isn’t fixed, you could always just reinstall a new version of WP and reinstall the akismet plugin too. Perhaps that could help.

  8. You should try Bad Behavior. I have it enabled along with Akismet. I don’t have a problem with spam (knocks on wood)

    My site used to get hit hard by spammers. Bad Behavior blocks them from even viewing your site. It’s nice.

  9. Akismet isn’t blocking spam? It did that for a while [as well as blocking some valid comments] :/ Perhaps combining it with another spam blocker?

  10. Try Spam Karma 2. In the past six months using both Akismet and SK2 on my site, only one spam comment ever got through to be displayed on the front page, out of 760 caught. Also, make sure you’re running the latest Akismet, and go to the options page to check “automatically delete spam on posts older than a month” Saves me a bunch of time deleting my Akismet spam.

    Bad Behavior can randomly block people from commentating. It’s happened to me many times, and the site owner has to add the IP to a whitelist. I definitely would recommend trying SK2 first before you decide to go with Bad Behavior.

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