Well, a few minutes playing around with WordPress plugins, and I’m a happy bunny. Installing plugins for this weblog is a breeze – I guess I’ve just had too much experience with nasty nasty php programs (cough phpBB), which was putting me off sorting out the spam issue with this one.

So I’ve now got plugins to automatically put trackbacks and pingbacks in the moderation queue, and I’ll see whether they work the next time I get attacked. I’ve never had a proper trackback or pingback before, so I’m not that bothered about them. I’ve also added a general comment moderation thing, which looks quite cool. It’s the Spam Karma plugin, and it rates comments by all kind of options, letting good ones through, giving dubious ones a further test, and just killing the dodgy posts outright.

I tried testing it, only to find that the plugin is more clever than I am. First off, it would let me post whatever I wanted, since I was logged in as the administrator. Then when I logged out, and tried using the text of one of the spam comments from yesterday, it successfully intercepted the comment, told me to piss of, and automatically blacklisted my IP and the URL I had given. Oops! So don’t try testing my comment moderation system, it works quite well…