Tackling spam in Textpattern
Textpattern is a Content Publishing System that I routinely recommend to clients and friends. It’s a very capable system, even if it is now beginning to show some limitations.
One such limitation is spam. This is not an issue Textpattern users suffered from until recently (Dec 2005 onward) and as such, when the spam bots began attacking it caused some consternation.
Fortunately, there’s a couple of ways to protect yourself.
- Never disable the force-preview feature – this is a deliberate method of countering spam.
- Give article commenting a finite life. Set a 4 week limit. This amount of time shouldn’t inconvenience anyone, and almost no spambot will find the article in this period of time (unless you’re a really, really heavily attacked site).
- Install an anti-spam plugin. asy_captcha is a simple CAPTCHA specially designed for Textpattern; also designed for maximum compatibility.
- To protect those who comment on your site, set the advanced preference “Never display email” to ‘yes’.
- Also set the advanced preferences “Comments require user email?” to ‘yes’ and “Comments require user name?” to ‘yes’ (they should be already).
- Make sure you update to the latest version of Textpattern – at the time of writing it’s Textpattern 4.0.4.
If these simple guidelines are followed, you will be reasonably safe from comment spam.