Last Saturday I was hit by a comment spam using the wrong character set. Well, it now appears that I can block ASCII comments. So comments made using the ISO-8859-1 character set will get blocked, whereas comments made using Unicode UTF-8 will be permitted. As this is what the comment form insists on, this would, in theory stop some of the comment spam getting through. I haven’t yet implemented it but may consider it.
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January 27, 2005 at 17:21
Erm, doesn’t that plugin require that there be at least one multi-byte character? All it seems to be doing is ensuring that the comment doesn’t match the regex /^[\x00-\xff]+$/, which seems quite useful if you have a site in Japanese or some other multibyte language, but perhaps less useful here, unless you are going to make hëävy mëtäl ümläüt use mandatory.
January 27, 2005 at 17:44
Oh, wait, those aren’t multibyte in UTF-8, either. Requiring that all comments be made in Japanese or Chinese or another non-western language would probably cut all your comment problems down to size, though.
January 27, 2005 at 17:46
I was actually waiting for someone like you to tell me that this wasn’t the plugin I wanted. Evidently I don’t know enough about character encoding.
February 7, 2005 at 12:48
This plug-in broke leaving comments at all on my site! Do not use this plug-in!