Orangescale.NET

Jun 03, 2008 / 3:08 am

TypePad AntiSpam is here

in Movable Type, Services, Webdev, wordpress / tags: akismet, antispam, movabletype, plugins, sixapart, typepad

Right, I have enabled TypePad AntiSpam plugin in this blog. It’s another antispam plugin created by Six Apart — a company behind blogging applications like Movable Type, TypePad, and VOX. I heard about this plugin few days ago, and it seemed promising, at least TechCrunch found it useful. :) Actually, I’m happy with my antispam plugin installed in my blog. Currently only have Akismet and WP-SpamFree (read my post about this). It works great, and I’m happy. WP-SpamFree has caught more than 2,100+ spams, and it seems Akismet does not need to do its job at all. Okey, it does but only a little — I only had less than 5 comments in moderation because WP-SpamFree thought that they’re not spam.

I’m curious about this new spam plugin. This plugin works for WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, Movable Type, and Typepad (of course!); and it’s built based on WordPress Akismet plugin by Matt Mullenweg. The installation process is very straight forward. After having the API Key. Using WordPress, we can have API Key for our Akismet plugin by creating an account at WordPress.com. For TypePad AntiSpam plugin, we can get an API key by registering at TypeKey. The registration is free. Since I already had a Typekey account, it tooks few seconds to get my API key.

After I installed this plugin, I disabled my other plugin (Akismet and WP-SpamFree). After few minutes, I had some comments in moderation. Okey, it showed that TypePad AntiSpam did the work. Looks good. But still, I had most them moderated and I needed to check them whether I need to delete them or not. I already missed my WP-SpamFree. Hey, I want to give TypePad AntiSpam a chance.

This plugin works great with Akismet (and WP-SpamFree). Probably, the main difference is that this plugin is completely free (read more about this). Akismet has some different licenses.

Anyway, I was a little bit confused when I inserted my TypePad AntiSpam Key in the configuration screen. I have 32-digit of TypePad key. But, when in the configuration screen, I was only able to insert 12 digits of numbers. There is a maxlength="12" attribute in the input text field. This input field only received 12 characters, but it says that my API key is valid. But, the point is that I have this plugin work. I’m interested seeing the result in the next few days.

Added later: I also have some lines in my .htaccess to ban visitors from certain IPs (around 100 IPs). Those IPs are from visitor sending spam (especially trackbacks). So, TypePad AntiSpam plugin does not handle 100% of the jobs in combatting spams in this blog.

• June 3rd, 2008 • # 3:08 am