I thought I’d kick things off on my new blog with a quick post on something I did while getting it set up.

Before switching to this new blog, I’d moved to using the spamhoneypot plugin on my old Habari blog to capture spam. I had a great amount of success in that switch, but in deciding to move to using WordPress on this new blog, I noticed that it had no equivalent plugins. There were several anti-spam plugins, but they all required use of a third-party service. I hadn’t seen consistent success with plugins that used this approach in the past, so I wanted to avoid repeating those experiences.

So, I decided to try my hand at writing a WordPress plugin. After wading through the filter and action documentation and googling around for a bit, I came up with a fairly simple plugin that seems to do the job.

The plugin works by adding a textarea field to the comment form that’s hidden using a CSS style. Since bots don’t generally detect CSS like this, they proceed to fill out the field like any other field. This implies that they aren’t a human being using a browser, in which case the plugin marks the comment as spam. I’ve found this catches the vast majority of spam comments with very few false results.

I’ve submitted to have the plugin hosted on the WordPress site, but until then, you can grab a copy off of a Github repository I’ve set up for it. Hope you find it useful!

Update 1/2/10 8:41 AM CST: The plugin is now available for download from the WordPress site.