Automatically removing spamers from the WordPress Coment Notifier Plugin’s Database
March 22nd, 2013 By nFriedly
Photo by anda (: There’s an awesome WordPress plugin called Comment Notifier – what it does is add that check box at the bottom of the comments section. If you leave it checked when you add a comment, then it will automatically email you with anyone ease’s comments in the future.
However, it has a slight problem with spam. When spammers leave comments, my combination of Akismet and NoSpamNX do a pretty good job of keeping spam comments of of the site, but not before their (usually fake) email gets added to the Comment Notifier database.
Recently, I realized that my server was trying to send out several hundred failing emails any time someone left a comment. I shot a short feature request (and a small donation) to the Comment Notifier plugin’s author, but then decided that this was one I could take on myself. Here’s how I did it:



I just finished a writeup on the necessary JS changes to support Facebook’s OAuth 2.0 upgrade, and then Hilary did a followup post on the server-side. 
I’ve seen a lot of confusion about this lately, so I thought I’d make a quick writeup to explain how facebook does it. (I’ll also give a quick tip on how you can do it yourself.)
I’m working on a project that has a legitimate (non-spammy) reason to need cross-domain cookies, and we settled on flash as a good way to accomplish this.

Most anti-spam methods used by websites today are annoying at best. They use impossible-to-read captcha images, or they make users jump through some kind of hoop to get the email address instead of just clicking on it. This can mean lost sales and opportunities for you, because each hurdle turns away more users. 
