Spam Control Activate!

I have cleaned up this blog’s spam-filled database of registered users through the arduous process of checking each user’s email against the Stop Forum Spam database (in case you’re curious, I can’t see your passwords – they’re encoded by WordPress). The list has gone from the suspiciously high number of 305 users (heavy on the Russian domains) to 52 hopefully-real-people. That’s still too high – 29 of those 52 are using known spammer domains, so I suspect I have more trimming to do. But I am hopeful that the spambot regs will drop off now that I’ve installed a WordPress plugin called SABRE that checks registrant IPs against blacklists. I have not turned on the Captcha or other “test” features because I hate using those myself, and always have doubts about accessibility. I’ve turned on the feature that requires you to respond to an email with 3 days or your registration is deleted, but you don’t have to respond to that email before logging in (which I hate having to doing myself). I can’t imagine that many people would feel a need to register for this blog, but if you do, I want to make sure it isn’t any kind of hassle. Commenting is open to all, and everyone can edit their comments afterward for up to 60 minutes (I’ve now removed this time limit for registered users). Registering does give you the option of using a gravatar in your comments, which is neat, but there’s no real to register unless you wish. I just wanted to stop my inbox filling up with rapid-fire registrations from spambots, and SABRE seems to have done just that :)