SpamLookup

Just installed Brad Choate’s SpamLookup for John Battelle‘s MT installation, ditching MT-Blacklist for the time being. Looks simple on the surface, but dig into the options and you start to realize this is the next generation comment/trackback-fighting tool. Actually, it’s a whole toolbelt, including realtime distributed blacklists (which probably accomplish 95% of the dirty work alone), moderation levels and exceptions for various types of commenters, bannable wordlists, and a built-in “Passphrase” feature you can use as a human detector. This last being similar in concept to a captcha, but text-based rather than graphical. The commenter is required to answer a dirt-simple question such as “What is John’s name?,” which a bot would be hard-pressed to do. If I wasn’t having such great success with MT-Keystrokes on birdhouse, I’d install it here as well…