BP Labs is a cool new plugin written by core developer Paul Gibbs for the purpose of testing out some new BuddyPress experiments. Paul recently announced BP Labs 1.2-beta-1 which begins testing for Akismet integration for the BuddyPress activity stream.
The BP Labs 1.2-beta-1 includes:
Added caching to @mentions autosuggest; it speeds up multiple requests for the same query
Added Activity Stream Spam experiment
If you’re a fan of the popular Contact Form 7 plugin but don’t like using ugly CAPTCHAs, you may want to consider adding the new Honeypot for Contact Form 7 plugin. It introduces an additional field in the form that, when filled out. will cause the form not to validate.
The idea of a Honeypot is that it provides an irresistable trap for the bots. Bots are stupid and they will attempt to fill in all of the form fields with their junk. The Honeypot for Contact Form 7 plugin catches them red-handed.
If you manage a blog or website of any kind then you have no doubt ran into the problem of spam.
Even if it is just a simple contact form, you have probably received some crazy gibberish about nike shoes, ugg boots, or male enhancement.
Update: Massive kudos to Otto who spotted that there were over 60 fake accounts created over a year ago and used for the purpose of knocking this plugin, now sorted, what a legend!
Earlier today I was browsing our ever increasing number of free plugin releases at WordPress.org and made a pretty unpleasant discovery.
Anti-Splog is the unrivaled plugin and service to stop and kill splogs in WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress. It goes far beyond any existing splog plugin for Multisite with its intelligent splog signup prevention and post-signup monitoring.
The big news today is that we’ve released Anti-Splog to the WordPress plugin repository so that more people can take advantage of its many layers of protection.
Here’s a quick visual introduction to how Anti-Splog works on your network:
Sploggers suck. They either suck real estate and legitimacy from your website with lame sales links or they suck your valuable time as you weed through crap blogs, trying not to throw the baby of legitimate blogs out with the bathwater.
Once sploggers find a network that’s vulnerable they’ll make themselves at home and return daily because it’s familar territory. They will often have a series of networks that they return to in order to earn income. Sploggers take it personally when you spam their splogs because you’re affecting their income. This causes them to be extraordinarily persistent.
When you first enable WordPress Multisite you may be surprised to find that the network management tools are fairly minimal. The purpose is to provide the basics and let networks add more management capabilities depending on your site’s needs.
If you’re a Multisite super admin, you’re sure to find a few new tools for your toolbox among these plugins. All of them have been newly added to the WordPress repository this month.
Dashboard Switcher
If your WordPress site doesn’t have protection from spam, then I guarantee you that you’re spending too much time sifting through spam comments and deleting spam registration accounts from your site. Spam is a common problem for WordPress sites, because bots have been trained to find vulnerable sites running on WordPress.
Block by Math Reloaded is a new plugin that was based on the Block-Spam-By-Math plugin created by Alexander Grau. It adds a simple math question to spam-vulnerable areas on your site. This new plugin is primed to work with WordPress 3.0. Check out a screenshot:
Update: I have written a post about where you can find free WordPress themes. So once you get to the end of this and are suitably concerned you can check it out for some great places to find your themes.
A few months ago I wrote about WordPress Security. Now, armed only with the words “free WordPress themes,” builtBackwards’ Theme Authenticity Checker Plugin and Donncha O Caoimh’s Exploit Scanner, I’m going to take a look through the first page of Google to see just how safe pages ranking for “Free WordPress Themes” are.
Most of the time a CAPTCHA is a boring and ugly skewed letter and number combination, sticking out at the bottom of your forms like a sore thumb. Why not have a little fun with your CAPTCHA and use animal pictures instead? That’s right, I said Animal Captcha!
This is a plugin that you may have missed in the repository since its description and instructions are in Spanish. Don’t let that hold you back – the plugin recognizes both Spanish and English when entering the animal names.
How does the Animal CAPTCHA work?
