Got home today and found my first trackback spam. Two of them from an apparently legitimate site: the car division of Expedia.com.
No time to make sense out of all this—the buggers are gaining on me! It was time to download Spam Karma 2 and turn it on.
Wow.
The plugin adds a “Spam Karma 2” tab to your Options page. When you click on it you’re served up an extremely thorough page, with lots of choices for settings under divisions like “Stats,” “Settings,” and “Advanced Options.” Options like “TrackBack Referrer Check” can be toggled anywhere from “Disabled” to “Supastrong.”
Not that I really know what all this stuff means.
Like the word “captcha.” It kept showing up in my Googlings on WordPress spam so I finally I looked it up on Wikipedia.
A captcha (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human… A common type of captcha requires that the user type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.
Most interesting. I can hardly wait to lay this one on Hubby.
And speaking of captchas, I spent a few minutes cutting and pasting code from Jeff Bar’s Spam Solution.
Turns out cutting and pasting isn’t such a great idea, because the “curly” quotes come into play and mess up the code. There’s also an extra space in one of the PHP statements that messes everything up, so if you’re having troubles implementing this solution, make sure ALL quotes are straight ones, and make sure there are no spaces between the php and the sideways V bracket in any of the statements.
Or whatever it is they’re called.
Now. What do you want to bet that people don’t know the answer to my captcha question?