Hi Clive,
Thanks for the feedback!
I like the idea of limiting the number of links per post. The feature wasn’t included originally because it is part of the widely-used Akismet plugin (no sense in duplicating features), however I see your point: it is annoying to have a ton of super-spammy-linky posts sitting in the moderation queue!
I’ll add a link-limit field in the next release!
Hi Josh or Tiffany??
Yea, the ‘pre screening’ of comments in wordpress is ‘crap’. I forgot I’d checked this out years ago and didn’t even bother trying it.
So, on the Settings/Discussion page you’ve two boxes to enter words to make attempts to pre filter comments.
BUT if you read carefully this is a waste of time because the filter isn’t able to identify words correctly. So, ‘press’ won’t just flag a hit for ‘press’ it’ll also pick out ‘wordpress’, ‘impress’ and so on. In other words it’s completely useless which is likely why it’s set to shift everything to be moderated.
If this actually worked properly then you’d be able to put say a common french word in the box (‘le’ or ‘la’ for example) and this would likely catch 99% of french spam. Even better would be to allow word pairs on a line ‘le & la’ which would virtually guarantee a french comment if there was a match.
However, even if the word search worked properly the first of these two boxes moves what it catches to ‘moderation’ and the second to ‘spam’. It should be that the first box shifts to a hand filtered ‘spam’ box and the second to ‘NUKE’. OR better still have a third ‘NUKE’ box BUT if anything is caught by the first two boxes it’s marked as being caught because it had word ‘XZY’ within the text.
Feedback on what is resulting in what is very important. If you don’t have feedback on what it’s doing and what decisions result in what outcome then you’ve no way of improving the filters you’ve put in the boxes. If it was set up properly then you’d have people posting the best combination of filters that would kill 99.99999% of Spanish spam for example.
So, maybe hijack or duplicate these ‘filter’ boxes in your own plugin and make them work properly and add a ‘nuke’ box? If you got this to work you’ve likely got a plugin they’d consider for core if nothing else because it would reduce what reached Akismet very likely massively?
Isn’t it odd that Akismet is dealing with billions of comment spam AND spam is a serious problem BUT no effort has been made in WP to provide a decent pre-filter that if done correctly would likely significantly drop what was left for Akismet to deal with?
Hi Clive,
An updated version of the plugin (0.8.0) is now available. It contains a new excessive link test, which rejects comments containing more than five links. Thanks again for the suggestion!
For the time being, there are no plans to incorporate any sort of language detection or word/phrase blacklist features. Sock’Em SPAMbots is meant to function as a drop-in, first-pass SPAM control system. The focus is on conservative, generalized tests that can be combined to block the first 98-99% of SPAM, while strictly minimizing the potential for false positives (catching humans by mistake) or the need for administrative intervention. Language detection and word/phrase blacklists are excellent features, but ones which require a level of specificity and fine-tuning more appropriate for plugins providing second-pass screening.
