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11 posts Started 1 year ago by Felix Schwarz Latest reply from Nathan Wright
Hi,
just wanted to note that I see the need for spam filtering, especially for comments as one of my MediaCore instances is currently under 'attack' by a tiny botnet (about 200 IPs) which tries to submit spam comments. I can control the situation currently (by utilizing Apache) but having something more substantial (e.g. reCAPTCHA, block comments for some time) would really make me feel better.
Are you using Akismet?
http://akismet.com/
We implemented this in the latest version of MediaCore. If you go to settings, comments, and then enter your Akismet API Key it should completely kill spam.
Get an API Key:
http://akismet.com/personal/
reCAPTCHA is free. Akismet charges money (in case of 100k+ pageviews/month it is more than $600 a year).
Regards
We can look at recaptcha, but this would be a great plugin to contribute if someone has time as it's not super high on the priority list at the moment. Are you getting over 100,000 views a month currently?
Yes! I am going to implement MC instead of our homegrown solution here: bankier.tv
This site gets far more than 100k UU monthly. Hope, we will be able to submit a lot of improvements to mediacore, developed by our coders.
That's pretty awesome. Is MC being used publicly anywhere?
We're doing some work with stripping out the regular comment platform (making it possible to disable this functionality) and substitute it with FaceBook comments. I'll see if we can add in reCAPTCHA without too much hassle. It won't make it into 0.9, but we'll put it on the radar list.
Stuart: AFAI K akismet is not even free for small sites if they are not for 'private use'. And while 5 $/month won't kill anyone, this complicates things a lot here for some of my clients. These are government-affiliated agencies or NGOs and they have pretty strict spending procedures. Basically they can not order by credit card (just paying based on a paper invoice with a paper quote before) and buying something outside of the EU is really extra hassle. So they really need something free or with a local EU dealer that's up to all the procedures.
reCAPTACHA comes with a small Python API (basically some simple http code to speak with the reCAPTCHA servers) however that code is (IMHO) an ugly mess. For my Trac reCAPTCHA implementation I wrote a self contained class which is unit-tested and (hopefully) much nicer. Just in case you're looking for some nice code :-)
Thanks Felix, the code you wrote looks much better than the generic python library, but it's adapted for trac, we'd happily take a patch, otherwise we'll have to look into integrating the generic python implementation for recaptcha.
One of our hosted sites got hammered today with spam so I think this is definitely something we'll be taking care of shortly.
Stuart: Actually I was quite careful that the core implementation does not depend on Trac. Check out reCAPTCHAClient for the communication library and the GenshiReCAPTCHAWidget for Genshi rendering.
It's only the actual TracCaptcha integration code that depends on Trac.
If it helps, I could certainly split the classes into their own files so you can just copy the complete file without any Trac dependencies.
Just wanted to mention that I split up the code in three classes/files (which was a good idea anyway ;-).
Should be clearer now which parts depend on Trac/TracCaptcha and which don't.
Great, thanks felix!
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