ANN: SA-Blog – Yet another SpamAssassin plugin

  • Certainly, there have been plenty of SPAM detection hacks and plugins available for WordPress. I thought that I would jump into the fray with my implementation.

    SA-Blog is a WordPress plugin that requires a working SpamAssassin 3.x installation. I’ve only tried this on Linux, but it should work (or be easily ported) to other Operating Systems.

    I put a hard-stop to any message that ranks as SPAM and display an error. Any SPAM message is not accepted and must be re-written before the comment can be added. The moderator shouldn’t have to delete messages that are clearly not wanted.

    Click here for a short setup guide and a link to the files if you are interested.

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  • Interesting idea, but I’m concerned about the mandate to rewrite any message flagged as spam. If someone has a legitimate comment with a few words that score high (it’s been known to happen), will they need to consult a thesaurus before their comment can be posted? That can be very frustrating. I’d suggest an alternate path to acceptance as well, like a Captcha check (a la Spam Karma) or even a “Check this box to submit your message for moderation instead.”

    I also wonder whether comment spam and e-mail spam are similar enough in content that SpamAssassin’s regexes (which are tuned for e-mail spam) are highly effective for comment spam. That’s not a protest; I honestly don’t know, and it seems like it’d be interesting to find out. The two certainly have different purposes. Has anyone ever tried gathering a corpus of comment spam that could be used for testing tools like this?

    – iJames
    https://www.invisiblejames.com

    Thread Starter brott

    (@brott)

    Yes, the exit on SPAM portion of the code will make this plugin unattractive to some people. I’ll look into the “check box” option as it definitely has some merit, but it’s not something I’m sure I want to do just yet.

    I don’t know about the similarity of comments & e-mail either. There will be a good degree of crossover as e-mail spammers make their way into blog-land, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the two will line up well. I’ve been extremely happy with SpamAssassin’s ability to correctly tag an e-mail message and wanted to leverage that functionality in WordPress.

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