extraterrestrialicious web apps

Finally I have this blog to post some interesting tidbits about my rails plugin dnsbl_check.

First of all, I am glad to announce that the plugin will become part of Instiki! Comment spam is a huge problem for any publishing platform, but Wikis tend to suffer extra. My plugin does help a lot battling the zombies, plus it’s very low overhead, thus great for high-volume sites.

I am working on a new release of the plugin which will enable a “pre-check”. In other words you’ll know that the current client will be denied access even before the client submits a form! Based on this you can choose to bypass the filter, or augment it with a captcha.

The funniest thing is that just a few weeks ago, a seemingly innocent person was denied access via the plugin. This person contacted me and I was quite bummed… false positives are never good eh? But after investigation I noticed that he had actually sent out spam! Tee hee … ‘t works! The lesson learned: don’t spam if you want to contribute to my forum. Sweet.

I am testing the new version, but it will be a while before I am releasing this. The current version of the plugin works just fine.