In what I hope is the only site-admin post I have to do for a while, please let me know if you have any trouble accessing the site, leaving comments, or receiving RSS feeds.
I do realise the irony that you probably won’t see this post if you are having trouble, but if you do find this, please email me if you are having trouble (alastair at this domain).
The reason I’m asking is because I’ve installed another anti-spam plugin (Bad Behaviour), to compliment Akismet.
Akismet has being doing an awesome job, what started as a trickle of 1-5 spam comments per day when I started has turned into a flood, currently at over 700 a day. It’s gotten to the point where almost 20% of the activity has an ‘unknown’ user-agent in my stats, which is pretty annoying!
Therefore I’m trying another plugin that prevents certain robots from accessing the site at all, but obviously there’s a possibility that it could prevent people (or Google) from accessing the site.
I’ll let you know how it goes, but please do email in if you spot a problem.
I just arrived here from your RSS feed, and it worked fine for me.
Since this is a site-admin note, have you found out what codes are allowed in messages?
Yes, just digging around in the includes you can use:
a (href), abbr (title), acronym (title), strong, code, em, del (datetime).
Do you think anything else is needed? I’ll add it to the comment form.
Oh, and Bad behaviour is recording 220 prevented connections in 20 hours, Akismet has caught 30 comments (down from ~700).
Hopefully that just means there are many prevented spam attempts…
Well, so far Bad behaviour is blocking hundreds of ‘bad’ bots a day, and Akismet caught spam is down under 100 per day.
It has also been noticable in the general access logs, reducing the visits by about 90 per day (1/5), and reducing bandwidth by slightly more than that.
Unless I hear from a person that hasn’t been able to access the site soon, I think I’ll be contributing to BB.
That does sound rather effective, indeed.
Thanks for writing the supported codes. I think those are the only key ones, although bulletpoints via
<ul>and numbered instructions via<ol>can sometimes be useful.