Why I quit using bbAntispam

If you are a Word­Press user, then you prob­a­bly have expe­ri­enced the sit­u­a­tion where you get a noti­fi­ca­tion via e-mail about a “new user reg­is­tra­tion”.  That’s all fine and dandy, but you come to find out that the user has a funny name like “pro­mo­eri­ierow”.   A red flag rises.  You know that no sane per­son would name them­selves “pro­mo­eri­irow”.  You then real­ize it’s spam.

“How in the world can I be get­ting spam reg­is­tra­tions?” you ask your­self.  I have asked myself that ques­tion more than once.  I still haven’t fig­ured out a com­plete answer, other than base Word­Press doesn’t have a CAPTCHA or any other “Are you a human?” test.  So, in all des­per­a­tion to end this trend, I found a solu­tion — bbAn­tispam.

It worked!  And it worked rather well.  It worked until I tried to post to my blog remotely via Win­dows Live Writer or Scribefire in Fire­fox.  For a solid two hours I tried to fix the prob­lem with my soft­ware, then with my blog.  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks — Oh noes!  I installed bbAntispam!

I went back to the forum to see if there was a workaround for this bug.  To my dis­may, there wasn’t one read­ily avail­able.  Since I pri­mar­ily post remotely, I decided this abil­ity was more impor­tant than try­ing to stop spam reg­is­tra­tions.  Since I have new users set to “sub­scriber” any­way, it’s not as big a deal.  I unin­stalled (i.e. deleted the files) bbAntispam.

If any of you avid read­ers out there (hehe) have any fixes, workarounds, or new plu­g­ins to stop spam reg­is­tra­tions, please leave a com­ment, send me an e-mail, etc.  I would really like to know how to fix it.

Related Posts:

• Com­ment Pol­icy: Should all blogs have one?
• Back to the basics of blogging
• Word­Camp Birm­ing­ham Wrap-Up, Part 1 of 2
• In which I change blog­ging topics.
• Theme Changes