Perfect – sort of…

It does the job of killing automated spambots that use the cURL command. Spammers use cURL to bypass your website’s post/ page and contact your server directly to access WordPress. It seems that cURL is how the ‘big boys’ of spam can flood the internet with their trash. So far this plugin has been flawless in its killing ability. I always moderated all my comments (because spam is out of control) along with Akismet. The annoyance I had was seeing all that spam in the queue! None of it was ever real. Akismet dumps all that dross in my spam queue for me to look at and fill up my database with trash. A complete waste of time, and there is no way to automatically delete this type of spam before it gets into the database. Which irks me. I looked at every type of plugin, but this is the only one that actually works in the way I want it to: nips spam in the bud. Never touches my database, and that makes me happy.

Hence my over-enthusiastic 5 stars for this plugin…

Nonetheless, it has a couple of issues on the admin side;

Issue 1
If you reply to a comment from the admin home page it will come up with an error (well it did for me, it thought I was a spammer in my own Admin LOL, you have to see the funny side), the workaround is to go client-side and post a reply on the post/ page. I can live with that for the time being.

Issue 2
The other issue I noticed it a reported change in IDs for comments. I use a plugin to show the IDs of pages, posts and comments, and after installing this plugin the ID came up as a long string of numbers and letters instead of the usual neat number. I checked my WordPress install’s database, and it seems to have not altered anything (a nice neat number in the database as always despite being processed by this plugin), and the ID of the comment is correct on the actual post/ page (viewed source in browser).

Both issues seem to be a bug. As there is no damage in the database I suspect it’s a display issue. I posted the first in the support and I’ll add that second. Rick answered and suspects it’s a filter issue.

5 stars
Still, for me 5 stars. That’s how much I hate seeing all that spam. No real person is going to use a cURL command to post to your website so I can sleep at night knowing that no legitimate user is getting binned. I hope Rick continues to support this plugin as it’s the best for blitzing the hell out of automated spam.

Philip

• This topic was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by philip-s. Reason: added '5 stars' in bold as a header on last paragraph