A little while ago, I changed the commenting policy on wabson to stop the spam that had started apprearing on the blog. I don’t think I ever mentioned this to anybody, however, so here’s the deal.
- Anybody who hasn’t commented on a previous blog entry needs to be approved by me and your comments will be held in moderation until I do this.
- If you have commented before then your comment should be approved automatically, so long as you put in the same email address each time.
- WordPress will never publish your email address on the public site, so don’t be afraid about typing it in.
I hate comment moderation, but something needed to be done to stop the spam and this is clearly less evil than filtering everything. As I say, just make sure you put the same email in each time, please :-).
Of course having said this, I haven’t had any spam comments in the last week or so. Is it spammer holiday season, perhaps?
Is that the policy on mine too?
Afraid not – your blog is a different WordPress installation to mine. I don’t even think I have a login for your blog in fact!
If you want to set up filtering you need to make sure that the option “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” in Options > Discussion is turned on.
There is however a bug with WordPress 1.5.0 that means you also need to put something in the box in the “Comment Moderation” section on the same screen (just above the “Check past comments against moderation list” link) or the options won’t take effect. Just choose a really nasty word that you wouldn’t want on your blog at all (or just some gibberish) to put in there. I think this is fixed in the latest version of the code, but I haven’t got round to installing that yet… 🙂