Archive for the ‘Minor Details’ Category
Today’s bot registered with a name of jacob73kolp and an e-mail address of jacobkolp@gmail.com. This brings the total of known bots to five:
It looks like I also found a CAPTCHA plugin that will work better than Skullbit’s, which worked only briefly on the test server and then simply refused to function properly thereafter. Hopefully this new one’ll be enough to keep the bots out.
The plugin is disabled until I can figure out what’s wrong with the thing. It’s always gotta be something…
A quick Google search returns (at the time I write this) less than a dozen results, but, as before, the sites returned mostly disparate WordPress blogs. Some of the results mention more than one bot, which alone is not necessarily damning, but certainly threw another flag.
That makes four iterations of the bot that have registered:
As of lunchtime today, I’ve got a captcha system in place, so hopefully this’ll keep the phony registrations at bay for a while. The captcha images aren’t the best in the world, being rather easy to analyze for those apps that do that sort of thing, but hopefully they’re good enough to screen out the bots. Or this bot, anyway.
Looks like adding a captcha feature to your WordPress blog is probably a pretty good idea at this point. Register Plus is the only plugin I found that states it’s WP 2.5-compatible (there’s no mention of this on the author’s page, but the readme file in the download mentions 2.5 as well). If this “user” shows up on your blog, you’d do well to remove it.
A Google search of the name currently returns only 9 results, but they are just as disparate as their predecessor, appearing on English-, Chinese-, and Spanish-language sites. The naming convention is undeniably similar. While I am pressed to find any significant number of posts from the previous iteration, it seems clear someone is going to throw the switch one day and a whole lot of WordPress blogs are going to sink under the weight of spam posts from “registered users”. Do yourself a favor and delete this “user” if it shows up on your own WordPress blog, just to be on the safe side.
Not that blog taxonomy, much less this site’s, is interesting to anybody, but there it is anyway. |