I have a problem

At the time of writing in under a month I’ve had over 7000 spam comments. This is annoying but so long as they don’t appear it’s not a problem. The problem is that last night over 20 got through every security check I have. Much as I would like to believe it I struggle with the concept that two people find a trivial entry so astounding they both have to comment on it. Then there’s the issue that with it being an older entry there are many more checks than on recent entries.

I’ve done all I can to get the security up, but if this marks the start of a new wave of spam then, with 7000 entries a month, comments become unusable. If this doesn’t work then one solution would be to disable comments until WordPress has a bug fix. Or else write hacks myself. Either way might be merely a short term solution.

Another solution I’m considering is something suggested by the TVfT. I may move this site to a Scoop based system. I’m still not entirely sure of the details of how it works. The attraction is that the Daily Kos is Scoop based. For those who haven’t heard of it, which would be most people at Leicester, this is an American liberal politics site. No doubt it attracts regular intentional attacks but seems to overcome them. The attraction of Scoop is that I can also consolidate the TUP and AMPAH sites under the same system. I could also open up the system for other people to run blogs, but I don’t imagine the uptake would be high.

The big disadvantage of Scoop is that it’s Perl based, and I’m not comfortable with Perl. Another would be that it if people did start running blogs then it may lead to advertising being a bigger feature on the site. Oh, and then there’s the factor that I only have limited access to FTP, which makes the whole uploading and fixing thing awkward till August.

I’m not certain of switching. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort porting data from one system to another and then discover that the same problems persist. Just a warning that if you do post a comment saying I’m utterly wrong about something then if comments are disabled it’s not me trying to shut down the conversation.