Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

Finally, I’ve released yet another but unique anti-spam plugin for WordPress. The formal description:

Publishing of a trackback or a pingback is postponed till someone, usually a trackback author, approves it. Trackbacks which are not approved in 20 hours are automatically deleted. It stops spam from bots and allows trackbacks from the real humans.

A better description is probably a description by an use case:

* Alice has Trackback Confirmation installed.
* Bob has written a blog post with a link to Alice’s blog post.
* Bob checks if a trackback appears in the Alice’s blog.
* No, the trackback hasn’t appeared. But Bob notices the link “approve trackbacks”.
* He follows the links, finds his trackback and approves it.
* Now Alice’s blog links to the Bob’s post.

It’s just a web 2.0 style of trackback moderation. Comments are approved not by the blog’s author, but by the blog’s visitors.

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From Wikipedia:

A Trackback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. … Some individuals or companies have abused the TrackBack feature to insert spam links on some blogs. This is similar to comment spam but avoids some of the safeguards designed to stop the latter practice. As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many weblog publishing systems. Many blogs have stopped using trackbacks because dealing with spam became too burdensome.

I’ve already published an idea how to resurrect trackbacks: trackbacks should be performed through an intermediate, not directly. (For details, read this post, “decline and fall of the trackbacks; rise and resurrection of the trackbacks”.) Unfortunately, such protection depends on a third party.

And here is yet another idea, which doesn’t require an external service.

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I know 3 types of spam in WordPress, and speculate one more:

* comment spam
* trackback (or pingback) spam
* registration spam
* plugin spam

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As the most popular blogging platform, WordPress is a target of spammers. If you are an average blogger, your everyday job is to delete spam from you blog, even if you have an anti-spam tool installed.

The default antispam weapon is Akismet. But I dislike it. More rambling follows later, now just google for “akismet sucks”.

What I develop, use myself and highly recommend to everyone is …

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