Update for Antispam Bee
This post originally appeared in Sergej Müller’s Google+ profile (in German) and is no longer accessible there. It’s now kept here by the Pluginkollektiv.
Yes, again an update for the antispam plugin for WordPress. The third one in the last weeks. But believe me, I publish updates not to annoy you, but to help you. Meanwhile, update cycles are as often as with the AntiVirus software on your desktops.
Recently, the volume of spam has increased enormously. Especially the techniques of spammers are becoming more and more sophisticated. I analyse the spam, react to user feedback, develop and test new defence mechanisms. It’s slowly becoming a full-time job, which robs me of a lot of free time 😉 Some people say I should change the plugin to paid. I won’t do that. It’s still working.
At the end of last week, numerous users contacted me and pointed out an extremely annoying wave of spam: Comments with randomly generated text and unreachable author links are left. Constantly different IP addresses, so there are zero clues. As a result a uniform pattern was detected, which Antispam Bee now uses to detect this type of spam. A new option “Use regular expressions” is available for this purpose.
A feature on top of it: From now on you can define your own antispam filters in the plugin, which are determined by regular expressions. For this purpose, Antispam Bee has been provided with an interface that can be “fired” by user-defined RegExp rules.
The update is availiable via Auto-Update in the WordPress-Admin. Changelog and the online manual are updated accordingly.