From the Fingers of Henrik Flensborg

Moderation ban has been lifted

January 5th, 2005

The problem with online poker spam posts making it past my CAPTCHA and into the moderation queue was solved quickly.

And it was actually my own fault that it could happen.

So what was the problem?

Well, I went and got the latest version of the WordPress CAPTCHA I was using and read through the readme file.

And there it was - in plain view

4. You have two options next, both require editing ‘wp-comments-post.php’:

To allow comments to come into the moderation pool, look for the following
lines in ‘wp-comments-post.php’:

if(check_comment($author, $email, $url, $comment, $user_ip)) {
$approved = 1;
} else {
$approved = 0;
}

and add this afterwards:

// authimage — Check if valid code. If not valid, send to moderation.
if ( !checkAICode($code) )

$approved = 0;

-or- if you want to dump the comment altogether and warn the commenter
that an invalid code was entered, look for the following lines in
‘wp-comments-post.php’:

if ( ‘’ == $comment )
die( __(’Error: please type a comment.’) );

and add this after it:

if ( !checkAICode($code) )
die( __(’Error: please enter the valid authorization code.’) );

When I first installed the CAPTCHA I went for the first option.

The result: All online poker comments were added to the moderation queue regardless of wheter the CAPTCHA was answered correctly or not because of the following WordPress option:

OptionsDiscussionComment Moderation

This option was set to “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than 5 links”

All the online poker comment spams contained more than 5 URL’s, so they automatically went into the moderation queue.

So, what is changed now?

Well, moderation for ALL comments have been turned off. Now it’s only those who violate certain rules that goes into the moderation queue.

If you fail a CAPTCHA you will not make it to the queue because I have now implemented the second option in the readme file.

BTW, 4 additional online poker spam comments made it to the moderation queue before I had this thing figured out ;-(

But now I’m confident that I - at least for now - have put a stop to automated spam comments.

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