Akismet no Longer Working on this Website

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Today I noticed that no one could post comments on this website anymore. The Akismet module appeared to be stuck in an infinite loop, or at least taking too long. After 60 seconds of execution, a PHP script is cut off (note: this time-out is different on other web servers). Since I lack the time to investigate and fix this problem, Akismet is temporarily disabled.

In order to prevent being spammed despite having no spam filter, math spam protection has been enabled. Math spam protection requires comment posters to solve a simple equation (e.g., what is eight plus three). Enabling this required adding the following line to mysite/_config.php:

MathSpamProtection::setEnabled();

Whilst I hope that this will prevent any spam from getting through, writing a script to parse and solve these equations would not be particularly difficult. My preference would be to use a more sophisticated anti-spam method, such as CAPTCHA. A module does exist for reCAPTCHA, but it is not integrated into the comment posting system. 

Hopefully the math spam protection will be enough for now. At least comments can be posted again.

Comments (1) | 7 January 2009