Apologies for the Overly Aggressive Spam Police
27 April 2015
I don’t view my WordPress dashboard very frequently, so I’d missed that the Stop Spammers Registration plugin had trapped 75 registrations/commenters it shouldn’t have, some of whom are regular commenters here.
Nor did I know where the UI was for that. (I do now and have whitelisted all 75 of you.)
I’m sure 75 sounds like a lot, but let me give you context here.
OpenID Change
A while back, I switched from one openID plugin to another because the one I had been using was not being maintained. The new one apparently let through a lot more spam registrations than the previous one did—to the point where that was more than half of my email.
Then I installed the Stop Spammer Registrations plugin. Blissful quiet.
Stop Spammers in total has stopped 33,680 spammers since 2014/02/26.
And, unfortunately, 75 legit folks. (As well as possibly more who didn’t say, “Hey!”)
Almost Half Were Cache Problems
There’s a joke in computer science:
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton
My host sometimes needs to service machines and switches me over without me noticing. This invalidates cache, and Stop Spammer Registration latches onto that like a fierce little puppy and growls.
Why? Because invalid cache is a security attack vector, unfortunately.
An Added Bonus
Ever looked at your Akismet spam queue? Even after setting it to delete the worst, I used to have 50-100 per day. Now I get 1-2 per week.
Though…
I’m going to look at the settings and see if anything needs to be tweaked.