One of the annoyances those of us with little blogs face is that spam attacks can take so much time to fix. We do not have legions of minions maintaining our blogs, and most of us also have these things called a “day job.” In my case, I really have two–being a professor and writing textbooks. One of the prime purposes of my blog is to interact with my biopsych students, which in turn means that I have to accept registrations and comments. This also means that I have to leave the cyberpaths a backdoor into my blog, which in turn means a daily routine of maintenance if I’m to avoid being blacklisted by Google again. Thank goodness for Rex Swain!
Over the past quarter, I usually had 4-5 fake registrations per day. Most originated in Romania or Russia, and inmail24.com seems to be a major source of problems. These are usually the first step to hacking your blog. You can’t just let them sit there. Not only do I get a separate email for each one, cluttering my inbox, but then I have to go into my user file, search for their name, and delete them (a two-screen process in WordPress). So needless to say, this takes up some precious time each day.
Long story short, I finally became sufficiently annoyed to search for a registration filter, and found a star–Sabre. Sabre is the brainchild of Didier Lorphelin, and it works like a charm! I woke up this morning to no spam registration emails and four blocked registrations that I didn’t have to do manually. What a nice Christmas present!
