Three types of spam in WordPress
I don’t have the problem of spam in WordPress (thanks Advanced Textual Confirmation), but anyway investigated the state of the art in order to decide, if it worths to promote ATC for WordPress. Here is a small report.
The search by the word “spam” at wordpress.org gives the following official pages:
* Combating Comment Spam
* Combating Comment Spam FAQ
* Plugins / Spam Tools
As expected, the main effort is spent on protecting from the comment spam. Different sorts of CAPTCHAs, Filtering, obfuscation of forms, etc, etc are proposed.
What’s unique to blogging, is the trackback spam. The WordPress approaches so far are:
* Pre-moderation
* Heuristics
* Checking the trackback link really exists (isn’t it pingpack?)
Each of these approaches has drawbacks. There are no ideal solutions. I think I know how to improve one of the approaches, but I don’t want to disclose the idea yet. Read the blog to be notified.
The third type of the spam — registration spam — isn’t covered at all. Therefore, if you build a community around your blog, you have no other choice but install Advanced Textual Confirmation.