I finally got a chance to update my version of .Text and add some new anti-comment spam enhancements. The first part was the easy part, adding Miguel Jimenez’s HIP-CAPTCHA Control, which will stop most of the current rash of comment spam (hat tip: Peter Provost). The second updated was to add moderation to all comments, postbacks and trackbacks, which required a bit of code changes (both Stored Procs and C#). I will put up the code soon, but I want to make sure all the bugs are shaken out before people go and update their .Text applications.
I may have gone a bit far in trying to eliminate comment spam by adding 2 checks, but I’ll wait and see what sort of feedback I get. One of the problems with CAPTCHA that it is not used in the Comment API, so spammers will eventually figure that out. But, I may just moderate comments submitted thru the API (I’ll wait and see). Another potential area of comment spam is Postback/Trackbacks. The way it currently works is that if a postback or tracback is invoked, a special version of a comment is added, and eventually the spammers will figure that one out too. So, they are now moderated. .Text did not notify the blog owner by email if a postback/trackback was recorded, so I added email notification to them (which I sort of like anyway, since you don’t always notice when someone links back to your blog).
Other enhancements I have to publish:
- Skinning of the aggregated blog page (uses the same skins as the blogs)
- Filtering of Referrals – My database is loaded with referrals for Google queries and they take up about half of the size of the database. Pretty much a waste of space.
Each .Text enhancement will be a zip file containing just the files that I updated, plus a SQL Script for the database changes.