Spam control block vrs htaccess?

I think that htaccess provides far more protection. I even have a module that appends new spam found by Stop Spammers to htaccess.

htaccess, however, will permanently block a user so false positives are not forgiven. It is possible for a user to lock themselves out of a site by accident. htaccess also requires that the file be maintained by hand. The Stop Spammers plugin is easily installed and used by someone who does not have the ability to maintain an htaccess file.

Keith

That would be a cool plugin if it used me as a filter. … ?? … If there were a link on the Log Report, along with the

I mean that, currently, I monitor the Stop Spammers Spam Prevention plugin, and then I take recurring bad actors from the Log Report and add them to my .htaccess file as part of the deny set.

I do have more than one than one .htaccess file for the wordpress server. One for the document/root level, and one for the wp-admin level.

An image -> LINK

The plugin that I used to use had no user options. Everything was done by changing the code. I wrote it for myself and never intended to release it. It would take a bit of work to release it as a usable add-on.

Keith

Oh well. … I can always hope. ??

@kpgraham that could make Stop Spammers useful in more situations. The current version doesn’t prevent contact-form submissions with static caching schemes where cached HTML pages are served directly from disk files, but could work fine if IP deny code was automatically saved to .htaccess. Forgiveness might require manual editing, depending on the functionality provided, but I suspect most website owners are far more interested in blocking troublemakers than in having an easy way to forgive them. As to blocking false-positives, there is no reason .htaccess blocking would have to be more permanent than the current method. Stop Spammers could periodically purge IP deny statements older than some user-specified age.

Incidentally, even though this issue currently prevents use at most of my sites, the functionality of Stop Spammers is otherwise terrific!

I like the .htaccess route because it stops things quickly. I am always concerned about using processor time to make things happen.

I am also looking at using the built-in pfctl PacketFilter options in the Mac OS X Firewall. Even if I use the pfctl option, I will still be using the Stop Spammers plug in with the Red Herring Add-on because it is amazing. … I use the Stop Spammers log for checking out the bad ip numbers because it has the direct links to the four major spam reporting sites. … I love it!