My blog was hit with a comment spam flood which almost brought down the server under load. There were aproximately 30 bots continuously posting spam comments, geez don’t they realize that none of the comments get published. With all the writes to the database, my servers came to a crawling stop. I disabled comments for a while, until I figure out a means to prevent the spam messages from being posted. First option was CAPTCHA, I installed re-CAPTCHA Wordpress plugin. This did reduce the spam but in an ugly way. I was thinking of a means to stop the nuisance spam without even writing to the database. Then I came accross this, and gave me the idea for Smart Throttle Wordpress plugin. It’s very simple, depending on the rate of comments in the last hour by the user the comment flood time out will be automatically adjusted. Check out the plugin home page for details how it’s done. The plugin is released under GPLv3. I have now disabled re-CAPTCHA plugin and so far things are looking good, most of the spam bots are lost in the you are posting too fast message ;) . Give your blog a break with Smart Throttle.

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