During the past week since the migration, I have been using an anti-spam plugin. At the time, I thought it merely needed some training to settle down. However, it seems that it doesn’t want to be trained. Despite whitelisting, it was still trapping regular commenters. I whitelisted Julia three times and it still happened. It turns out it didn’t like the letter combination in her email. Something similar happened to Discoveredjoys.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll live with clearing out the spam queue from time to time rather than disrupt the comments system. This one was worth a punt, but turned out to be too aggressive.
My website was being plagued by form spam which I expect is very similar, do a google search for cleantalk, it’s about $10 a year and they have various plugins. I’ve gone from 10 a day to maybe one every couple of months, I pay a bit extra for the API service as well as that way I can block the pages even loading if they are in the database, happy to provide the php script I wrote to you or grandad.
I had a comment on the coffee cup story blocked but then Bucko came on and said what I was going to say anyway. Elsewhere someone said that they have the phrase “could of” flagged so that anyone using it in their resume goes straight into the bin.