Software bounty – $100 for comment-spam blacklist tool

May 12, 2009|rickColosimo|Comments Off on Software bounty – $100 for comment-spam blacklist tool

Over on Triiibes, there is a group for wordpress users; the population seems to trend pretty heavily to blogging types, so it’s pretty lively and there’s lots of direct experience with issues.

Someone recently asked about dealing with comment spam in a way that goes beyond the super-awesome akismet plugin for WordPress, which has been 100% effective (no Type I  or Type II errors, at all, across any of my blogs) at identifying comment spam. That’s performance.

In any event, I remembered I’d read an article that talked about modifying .htaccess to block specific IPs.

Jay Tillery, a designer and WP guru, reminded me that WP 2.7 has a nice big field for entering IP addresses to be blocked. It’s on the Settings:Discussion page in your admin screens.

But, unless you’re working your blog all day (in which case you should probably be writing rather than configuring), who wants to cut-and-paste IP addresses from Akismet? I know that I don’t; it’s just an extra step.

So, here’s the latest software bounty project:

Wanted: a WP plugin, compliant with at least WP 2.7, that adds per-item checkboxes in the akismet comment spam review page and, upon the action in the page, such as deleting spam or a separate “blacklist” button, adds the IP addresses to the comment blacklist field in the Settings:Discussion options page.

Feature: allows for a global “blacklist all” option for individual IPs.Reference: When using the Akismet plugin, the IP address for a spam comment is available and even a sortable field.

Reward: $100 for first working version. Submissions to rick@thoughtstorm.com. I will test the plugin myself and then have a colleague confirm the solution is acceptable. All submissions will be recognized here.

Also, the best version of the plugin (which may not be the first) will be sponsored by us to develop and market a “pro” version of the plugin that includes advanced features such as integration with other external blacklists/whitelists, blacklist sharing features, configurable IP block address blacklist rules, or others.