Topic: Seeking testers for Spam Destroyer

Seeking testers for Spam Destroyer

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

Hi everyone,
I launched a new experimental version of my Spam Destroyer plugin today. Previously I had added crude support for BuddyPress and bbPress, but had not properly tested it.

This time around I’ve tried to beef it up quite a bit and make sure it works as well as possible to block those pesky spam registrations.

I do however need some testers to give it a bash and see how well it works. I can test this thing in private all I like, but in the absense of real world testing I’m somewhat guessing as to it’s effectiveness.

http://geek.ryanhellyer.net/products/spam-destroyer/

Thanks for any input you can give. I am super keen to hear of the results.

Need more protection?
If you would like absolute maximum spam stopping abilities, there is also a very untested CAPTCHA based system rolled into it. You can test this by editing the definition for SPAM_DESTROYER_PROTECTION and changing it from “low” to “high” in the plugins index.php file. Eventually I intend to make this automatically increase the spam protection as your site is hit with more spammers, but I haven’t got that functionality implemented just yet

Viewing 22 replies - 1 through 22 (of 22 total)

@djpaul

Keymaster

11 years, 9 months ago

Looks cool. What types of integration does it have? Spam user signups?

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

It does user registrations, site registrations and logged out user comments.

I don’t actually use BuddyPress, so don’t have any way to test it in a live situation myself. It is dealing with my blog comment spam flawlessly though.

@mercime

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

@ryanhellyer thank you for posting your plugin here 🙂 We’ll surely check it out.
Cheers.

@ubernaut

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

looks cool i’ll keep it in mind for any future buddypress test projects!

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

The plugin seems to be working fine so far. I haven’t received any complaints so far.

I’ve posted a new version for download:
http://geek.ryanhellyer.net/products/spam-destroyer/

The main difference with this new version is that it lets me track statistics on how well the plugin is working on your site (assuming you opt-in for it). This should help me work out how well the plugin is working without having to pester people for updates on the plugins progress 🙂

@ubernaut

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

it’s an interesting plugin no doubt i know it’s probably a bit early to be able to give a real apples to apples comparison but i’m just wondering how the accuracy compares to API based spam/splog prevention such as akismet or wangguard.

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

It should be more “accurate” since it’s not using heuristic techniques to detect spam. Those sorts of techniques should work very well in concert with what my plugin does though. Anything that gets through the Spam Destroyer should be fed through Akismet for checking, in theory leading to an extremely low amount of spam.

@diondeville

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

Definitely need something to can the spam. I had to disable Akismet on one site because it prevented comma separated lists being posted. Will Spam Destroyer allow comma separated lists to be posted?

@diondeville

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

Second post to activate followup notifications (can the forum mods assume we want to know about follow ups and work on an opt out basis, please).

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

The Spam Destroyer plugin definitely won’t stop comma seperated lists. It doesn’t even look at your post content in fact.

@diondeville

Participant

11 years, 9 months ago

Thank, Ryan. Will take a look.

@ubernaut

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

so i read this plugin is not currently compatible with Jetpack is that correct? thanks!

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

Jetpack is not currently supported. I might get around to testing it with Jetpack in the future, but I haven’t found the time to do that yet. Jetpack makes things very difficult to test wtih.

@ubernaut

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

gotcha not to try and make you explain why or anything since i probably wouldn’t understand the answer anyway but a LOT of wordpress sites do use JetPack i pretty much consider it a prerequisite for any site that wants traffic.

Thanks for all your hard work in the good fight against spammers and sploggers though!

@tibmix

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

@ryanhellyer Because I make use of BuddyPress I installed “Spam Destroyer version 1.4.3 beta” plugin.
The immediate consequence was that any attempt to post or create a new topic ended in “ERROR: Your reply cannot be empty.”
I had to disable it for now.
I found no setting for this plugin and I agree to help you test it. Be aware I’m not a developer, just a WP regular user.
How do we proceed?

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

Thanks tibmix!

Thanks for trying out the plugin. I have no idea why that bug would be occurring, but I’ll look into it soon for you and see what I can work out. It seems to be working fine on my test installation, but I have a slightly different version on my live site.

Once I’ve done some testing (probably tomorrow evening) I’ll post back here, hopefully with a solution.

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

gotcha not to try and make you explain why or anything since i probably wouldn’t understand the answer anyway

You will understand. It’s simply because Jetpack only seems to work when something is on the internet. That makes testing pretty much impossible unless I launch a live site just for testing Jetpack, which is kinda ridiculous.

but a LOT of wordpress sites do use JetPack i pretty much consider it a prerequisite for any site that wants traffic.

To each his own. I strongly dislike Jetpack. Myself and many others recommend people against using it.

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

Just to clarify, I do intend to add support for Jetpack eventually, it’s just at the bottom of my list of things to support since it is a hassle to deal with.

@ubernaut

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

ok thanks for the update but now you have me wondering when you say:

To each his own. I strongly dislike Jetpack. Myself and many others recommend people against using it.

is that just due to development reasons or is there another reason you don’t like it?

i would admit that there are components i don’t like (easy enough to disable selectively) but it is the only decent way to provide stats to content contributors without giving each of them GA access (as well as other various other things that seem to only be possible with JP).

Anyway just curious never heard anyone say they had anything against jetpack before.

@ryanhellyer

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

is that just due to development reasons or is there another reason you don’t like it?

Brian Krogsgard summed it up pretty well … http://krogsgard.com/2012/jetpack/

@ubernaut

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

An interesting post thanks for sharing i would say that i would tend to disagree with some of the basic assertions he makes mainly about the requirement of linking to a wp.com account and also i would note that it seems that he does in fact use it himself but just not for every client.

Anyway not trying to go too far off topic and again i do appreciate your sharing your opinion on that as well as you work towards fighting spam.

@diondeville

Participant

11 years, 8 months ago

Hi Ryan, I tested the plugin but went with a different option (email domain blocking) due to the spammers being able to bypass every other tool used, including honeypot traps.

I noticed a bug in the beta version I downloaded in the early hours of this morning (v1.4.3): the tracking message wouldn’t click-off no matter which option I chose or who clicked it.

Thank you for putting the plugin together. We might give it a try again later.