For regular spammers and sploggers, banning their IP address is a simple and effective way to get rid of them. I will describe three methods here with the simplest at the very end. Let’s take a simple case study. ntoolz.net has been copying my posts with an automated content creation tool and then blessing me with a pingback for his splog content! So I decided to ban him.

Read more (693 words) »

Translator Plugin Pro provides automatic machine translation of WordPress blogs in 13+1 languages - German,Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and optionally Norwegian.

The new features in version 5.1 are:

1. In the option page (under Advanced -> Miscellaneous section) it now provides SQL queries which you can execute in your database to significantly speed-up Translator Pro on heavily trafficked sites. It adds indexes to the tables for faster querying.

2. Improved user interface

3. Translator Plugin Pro adds a new feature to verify completeness of translated pages by checking for keywords or tags in your page. This elegantly handles the failures in third party translation engine. This adds to the extensive checks we perform to ensure quality and completeness of translated pages.

4. New translation engine errors have been added for automatic fail-over support and load-balancing.

5. Overall performance improvement and optimizations have been added to this release.

6. New extensive documentation have been added in this release, old documentation revised and updated. You can read the full documentation here. Don’t forget to check our developer API for writing your custom look and extensions.

You can read about all the features here.

We now provide online help desk on our new support site. Please register there for customer support.

Please post your feedback in Translator Plugin Pro forum.

Translator Plugin Pro 5.1 is fully compatible with WordPress 2.5 as well as earlier version of WordPress.

I am very happy to announce the much-awaited release of Comment Guard Pro for WordPress blogs. Comment Guard Pro is designed to unobtrusively protect your blog against all types of comment spams - trackback spam, pingback spam, robotic spam using comment form, human submitted spam (where the spammers actually goes to your site to spam you; they are the hardest to detect), referrer spam etc. We provide multiple layers of protection against all kind of comment spams.

Comment Guard Pro is a zero configuration plugin, even your grandma can use it. However if you want, you can configure every aspect of the system. You can make it your own, implement your own vision, replace, enhance and extend its functionality.

Comment Guard Pro is state-of-the-art comment spam detection software based on expert system to classify comments. Comment Guard Pro leverages several tried and tested comment spam fighting techniques & knowledge which is the result of several man-years of research into comment spam detection, both in-house and by the anti-spam community. We extensively tested and re-tested and fine-tuned the system with the key criteria - elimination of false positives and false negatives in comment spam detection.

Most spams are outright rejected without filling up your database and consuming your resource. Comment Guard Pro doesn’t normally ask your viewers to do anything extra like solving a problem etc.
Note: We reject a comment only when we are sure about its spamminess.

Comment Guard Pro was born after years of frustration with the state of comment spam prevention software available today. They fall in two major categories. Either they are ineffective in stopping spam (too many false negatives) or too strict and even deny legitimate comments (false positives). They are a pain in the neck for genuine commenters, resulting in bloggers losing their audience, and generate lots of false positives (marks a genuine comment as spam) which consume bloggers time to moderate. They also consume bandwidth and CPU by saving the junk comments in your database.

There is another issue. To eliminate false positives from existing plugins, you have to check their spam queue manually. It might be ok for 5-10 comments in queue, but not for say 2000-10000 comments in spam queue as is commonly the case with a widely used Comment spam protection plugin today. Most of such plugins protect against some type of comment spam or other but not the whole range. Frequency based spam detection techniques, for example, let in deluge of spams from new spammers. None of these are acceptable. Ultimately you get frustrated and tired of bloggng and suffer burn-out.

A big issue with today’s comment spam protection software is that you get a blackbox with no direct control over its actions. A widely used anti-spam plugin today is renowned for marking even the blog author’s comment as spam and another for even locking out the blogger from his own blog! The software today doesn’t respect your preferences. In short you lose control over your comments and have to blindly trust a third party for making the right decision about your comments; and often it fails.

Not any more. Comment Guard Pro puts you back in control over your comments. You control how it makes its decision. If you don’t like the logic employed by a pluglet (a rule) then you can decrease its score, change its decision on success or failure and you can even disable it. You can even add your own pluglets to implement your grand vision. You are the boss.

Comment Guard Pro gives you back the control and time to do what you do best, blog.

Comment Guard Pro is pluggable. You can individually control each pluglets, configure and fine-tune their functionality and weightage. You can also write your own pluglets to add more spam prevention techniques, gather more statistics or anything else you may desire like sending a cute / angry note to spammers and more. It comes with fully documented open pluglet API and examples to enable you to write your own pluglets.

It comes with lots of valuable features and functionalities. It was extensively tested for about a year with over 5 million comments. It came out with flying colors. Read more here (press).

March 3rd is our D-Day. We will launch a new version of our corporate website. We will also launch Comment Guard Pro, a WordPress plugin to eliminate comment spam from blogs. We will also formally launch our new forum and customer support site. This is a big big event for us.

Read more (148 words) »

We have opened a forum for all our products and blogs. I haven’t officially announced it yet. Please check it out, register and leave your feedback and comments. Looking forward to hear from you.

The Spamhaus Exploits Block List (XBL) is a realtime database of IP addresses of hijacked PCs infected by illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies (HTTP, socks, AnalogX, wingate, etc), worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits. I was recently testing this list againt spam email. Here are few observations from our testing.

Read more (376 words) »

Ever since we installed Comment Guard Pro, anti comment-spam plugin on this blog, it stopped over 1 millon spam comments (1001011 spam comments were blocked by Angsuman’s Comment Guard plugin in 335 days 8 hours 38 minutes. 99.338 % of the comments received during this time were spam.) so far (look in the right sidebar for latest stats). The pro version of the plugin is now being tested on this blog and other sites.

In Comment Guard Pro have developed multiple layers of defense to stop all kind of comment spams - spams submitted using comment forms (robotic or by humans), pingback spam, trackback spam and referrer spam.

Comment Guard Pro is a modular plugin where each module acts as independent spam filters. Many modules are developed with technologies developed in-house. Others leverage best existing technologies out there. You can also develop and add your own modules as well as share it with others.

So far it is all-green on QA front, only minor defects and enhancements.

UPDATE: Comment Guard Pro has been released.

Akismet continues to get in spams approved these days while sometimes rejecting valid comments on my blog. To give you a small sample, here are some of the comments which passed through Akismet plugin today -
Read more (489 words) »

There is a widespread assumption by many bloggers that comments on old posts are mostly spam. There are several WordPress plugins to prevent commenting on old posts, even posts as recent as one month old like, for example, Akismet. This is plain wrong and can result in losing many valuable comments. Such practices should be discouraged by bloggers. Let me explain why.

Read more (225 words) »

I like to say that Comment Guard Pro will be the final plugin you will ever need for WordPress comment spam protection. It contains 18 pluglets for protecting you from comment spam, an open API for you to write your own pluglets, detailed live statistics (AJAX updated) and more. We have combined years of experience of ours and the community in comment spam protection, used extensive data from Comment Guard plugin which we deployed on our sites and few beta sites for a year to develop this plugin.

I am happy to say that the much awaited Comment Guard Pro is now released for internal testing so we can fine tune the settings before release. We should be able to release it in mid-December.

Comment Guard Pro was born out of our frustration in dealing with Comment spam. We gave excessive stress on quality and functionality in this product. No real comment should ever be lost. You shouldn’t have to pore over Akismet or any other comment spam moderation queue to find out false positives. Comment Guard Pro is designed to give you peace of mind and save you time to allow you to focus on blogging (and your life).