Symphony.

I am trying out these extensions on my comment form and have a few questions.

How can I tell if they are working? So far I haven’t managed to get any comments flagged as spam even when they include references to p_nis enlargement, _rectile disfunction and v_agra. Any ideas on how to test the extensions?

Both extensions rely on hidden form fields. In the interests of security (and having fewer form fields to repopulate if there is an error) I would prefer to set these values in the event PHP. Can I use $_POST to set these fields as with any other form field?

I believe that the Akismet WP plug-in stores spam in a separate table so that you can check it for false positives. Do the Symphony extensions provide anything similar? If not would there be interest in such a feature?

Thanks.

I recently had to swap out Can of Spam for Answer Me, as my site received dozens of spam comments.

I use Akismet and rarely get spam on my forms, but it doesn’t save anything flagged as spam. It does return a notification that you can use to warn that the message didn’t go through because it was flagged as spam.

My concern about spam being silently blocked like that is that there’s no way to know how much ham is being caught in the crossfire. Sure the user is shown an error message but they won’t necessarily attempt a resubmit. A safer approach would be to save the comment for review and tell the user that their comment is being moderated. Or at the very least add some logging. I might have a look at this at some point.

I recently had to swap out Can of Spam for Answer Me, as my site received dozens of spam comments.

Did you have Akismet installed too?

Sure the user is shown an error message but they won’t necessarily attempt a resubmit. A safer approach would be to save the comment for review and tell the user that their comment is being moderated.

This is the way I have seen in an Expression Engine extension (some time ago when I still used EE). I have experienced that Akismet is very very good. But moderating (and sending back those results to Akismet’s API, as far as I remember) is said to make it become even better.

Re the second question in my original post, setting values in the PHP seems to work for the Akismet event filter (and Send Email too) so I have removed the corresponding form fields. I haven’t touched the Can Of Spam form field yet in case it needs to be in the form to work. Would removing it from the form basically disable it?

I could still use some advice on DS Output Parameters as I can’t work out how to access them from the event code. And if anybody else wants to weigh in on the first or third points above, feel free. I now have an Akismet fail case (setting the website to www.google.com) but nothing I’ve tried has triggered a Can of Spam error. Might need to look at the code…

Thanks.
Paul

Did you have Akismet installed too?

I did not.