Some Badly needed Wordpress Plugins
Jan 25th, 2007 by Kirk M
Lots of spam comments in Akismet lately.Hmmmpff! Must be getting popular.
I went into my host’s cPanel to check my stats and low and behold I found two of the sites linking to my blog were “xslut.***” and xslut/blog.***”. It seems that Akismet (a most excellent plugin) had a problem recently and a couple of spam comments (spamments? comspams?) got linked into my Just Thinkin blog before Akismet came back online and snagged them off. So I wandered over to the Wordpress 2.1 compatible plugin list found and installed the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin and the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin, added a bit of code into the Comments.php file for my theme and vi-oh-lay(!)…the plugins were up and running. Hopefully I won’t have anymore “barely legal” type links to my blog anymore. Definitely not acceptable!
While I was at it, from a suggestion from Becky at Sprites and Bites, I installed Subscribe to Comments which gives the reader an option to subscribe to the comments of any particular post. It also allows a reader to unsubscribe as well which is even more important. 
So now, with all the new plugins tucked snugly into the blog, I can rest easier knowing that I will no longer find nasty type links in my stats (knock on head wood) and that my readers will be assured they can receive those massively important ‘Just Thinkin’ comment updates I know they all just gotta have–I will now head towards the bedroom and a good night’s sleep.
Pleasent dreams from Stove Pipe City.
Update 08/06/07: Although the above anti-spam type plugins listed are still valid for the latest version of WordPress (currently 2.2.2) for new blogs and blogs without a lot of hits per day, for the blogs with a fair to high amount of traffic I recommend adding the Spam Karma 2.3 plugin and dropping the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin and the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin since SK2 covers both areas if the plugin detects a comment might be spam and it does this very well.
For further info please refer to the Plugins I Use page which resides with the other pages at the top of the header image that keeps an constantly updated list of the plugins I use on this site. Most of these have been installed for a significant period of time simply because they work well and do the job.
Thanks for visiting!
