I have had a bit of a poke around in the code, but don’t understand WP Plugins well enough to find the appropriate bit of code. I guess WP provides some database access stuff through API metheds, but I don’t know what they are. :(

What”s to stop someone from paying people to enter spam comments manually and thus bypass your test?

Nothing. This is merely another tool in the overall scheme for me. If someone wants to pay a lot of someones to enter inane comments by hand into my blog Gatekeeper won’t help… that’s where other tools come into play. Between the Gatekeeper and the built-in moderation keys and blacklist stuff on WP 1.5, I feel like I have the tools I need. Currently.

My problem with the automatic blacklists like Spam Karma is that it had false positives that were very difficult to figure out and correct. Coupled with its tendency to punish multiple posters — an ordinarily sound practice, but unfortunately harsh when people post something that gets cut for some reason, then post to ask why, then post again to ask why the previous one was disallowed… it can get ugly.

I have a problem with this solution. What’s to stop someone from paying people to enter spam comments manually and thus bypass your test?

When I worked in india, I discovered that people were being paid to “enhance” hit / visit / Alexa ratings. I am not talking about one or two people. I am talking about organised “campaigns” to boost ratings. This usually involved a chain of cyber cafes across the company.

I thought the old blacklist plugin was a lot better solution. (It seems to have stop working with WordPress 1.5) When it was working, I only got the odd piece of spam. Is it a better idea to have an automated blacklist with the ability for wordpress users to update the global list?

Don’t get me wrong, Gatekeeper is a good idea. My problem is that the spammer will get smarter :-(

To summarize, I honestly forgot I had installed WP-Gatekeeper and was concerned that something was broken on my site, though I was getting plenty of legitimate comment traffic. Then I remember the Gatekeeper. I modified your code slightly to keep track of the number of failed validations and report it on the plugin page as well as on the dashboard… in 15 minutes I received 12 thwarted spam comment attempts. Just awesome.

Thanks again for this tool.

Since I’m now at SXSW, hopefully I’ll find someone with the skills to help me out. Meanwhile, you can use the explicit gatekeeper_pose_challenge() call until I get this sorted out.

Even with all other plugins deactivated, I get no textarea search and replace. The only behaviour with gatekeeper turned on is that when I submit a comment, I get the error message from the gatekeeper_stand_guard() function.

I’ve tried using the following themes: classic, default, quentin 0.9, and steam 1.5, and all had the same problem.

Thanks, Nick.

I thought I was clear about where to run the upgrade file in the post: “To run it, uncompress the archive and drop the PHP file into your main WordPress directory, then load it up in a Web browser.” Good idea about the test, though. I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future.

The lack of CAPTCHA is very odd, because I tested the plugin with my copy of Kubrick and it worked fine for me. Even if the plugin didn’t find the right place, it should still have picked up the textarea and dropped into place after it. Any chance there might be a conflict with other plugins you’re running?

Also, you might want to make explicit where to place the upgrade file. I placed mine in wp-content/plugins, and then in wp-admin (where the wordpress upgrade script is), and finally in the root wordpress directory. Perhaps you could detect which directory the file is in – I had limited success using php like
if (file_exists('wp-config.php')) {

I’m using the default Kubrick installation, and neither 1.5rc1 or 1.5rc2 added a captcha to my comment form.

Thanks.
-Jed

Anyhow, I’ve checked it this time, and being so tired, I put in the wrong answer! Apart from that, the only bug I can find quickly is the Markup Template gets put back to the default.

The update script has been, you guessed it, updated. Try again, please.