Sudden flood of spam

  • Resolved inge12

    (@inge12)


    11 years ago

    I have been using Conditional Captcha for quite a long time and left a 5-star positive review.

    Then, after the latest update, suddenly comments posted automatically to our web site, without being manually moderated, as our policy had been. [Hint: There are other reasons besides avoiding commercial spam for manual moderation.]

    I checked and saw that under “Settings/Discussion” the check box before “Comment must be manually approved” was unchecked.

    I thought that our site had been compromised! But I turned moderation back on.

    Then I found that 100’s of comments ended up in our Spam folder, as they used to do before Conditional Captcha.

    So I checked Akismet: All green.

    I checked Conditional Captch and encountered this message:

    Warning: the following WordPress discussion settings take priority over this plugin and will prevent it from displaying a CAPTCHA. It is recommended that you turn them off by unchecking the boxes below.

    Before a comment appears:

    Comment must be manually approved

    That effectively means that we must choose between Conditional Captcha and moderation of our blog. [Hint: Conditional Captcha is not a substitute for intelligent moderators!]

    I am SO DISAPPOINTED that Conditional Captcha is no longer useful for us! We used it to dispose of spam comments so they would not clutter up our spam folder. And it worked marvelously until the latest update. And I recommended the Akisment+Conditional Captch combination as the ideal spam solution on a number of discussion boards.

    Why did you change the behavior of Conditional Captcha to disallow manual moderation of non-spam comments???

    If you cannot or will not change the behavior back to what it used to be, the plugin is useless to us, and we need to look for another.

    And, of course, I’ll have to amend my review. ??

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-conditional-captcha/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Samir Shah

    (@solarissmoke)

    Hi @inge12,

    Thanks for the comprehensive comment.

    A few days back I had released an update which tried to accommodate a feature request from another user. Unfortunately it turns out that I didn’t realise what the implications of that would be, and it has broken the functionality for many other users.

    I have just released a new version (3.6) which takes everything back to the way it was before – please check and let me know.

    Thread Starter inge12

    (@inge12)

    Whew! Thank you so much, Solaris!!

    This plugin was such a life saver for us! There is no other solution that works as well and as comprehensively as the Akismet – Conditional Captcha combination.

    I’ve tried out a number of other “solutions.” The ones the eliminate spam in the spam queue appear to be so aggressive that they eliminate legitimate comments – which I only found out by good fortune.

    roam92

    (@roam92)

    There is no other solution that works as well and as comprehensively as the Akismet – Conditional Captcha combination.

    Absolutely agreed – we looked around a LOT and found nothing that works better than these two in combination, for both eliminating spam and avoiding false positives, with no undue burden on the commenter…

    So here’s my question: We never upgraded to version 3.5, as we always like to wait a little while after any plugin update is released – but if we now upgrade to version 3.6 (direct from current 3.4.2), will anything be different at all? Will any action be required on our part in WP settins or elsewhere?

    Thanks again for such an amazingly helpful and time-saving plug-in!

    Plugin Author Samir Shah

    (@solarissmoke)

    Hi. You can safely upgrade from 3.4.2 to 3.6 – the behaviour of the plugin will not change at all and you don’t need to take any further action.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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