Hooking up with Spam Karma 2

All of a sudden, the bad guys have discovered my blog, the spam bad guys that is. Everything had been hunky-dory with this blog’s administration since I switched over to WordPress just about two months ago now. I set WordPress to email me every time I received a comment so I could moderate posts. Posts occassionally came in over the transom at a rate of maybe one a week. Then suddenly over the past few days dozens of identical posts (all spam about enlarging the male sex organ, for goodness sake) have flooded the blog. I’d been discovered. How to stop the flood? WordPress itself didn’t seem to have a tool or setting to do the job.

One of the great things about WordPress, however, is the extensible architecture. In other words, features can be added by enterprising programmers who write plugins adding functions that WordPress itself left out. And like Adam Smith’s theory that we’ll do better on the whole if we divy up tasks to those best suited to performing them, the plugin writers can constantly tinker and improve their products as they see fit. A quick bit of research endorsed a plugin called Spam Karma. I downloaded it and copied the files to my plugins folder. After activitation, a new page of settings showed up in my WordPress administration section. I’ve left everything with the defaults and I’ll report back on how it goes.

p.s. while writing this post, I checked on the spelling of “hunky-dory” and found this insightful explanation of the term’s origin.