Finally I am confident enough to release the new theme – I have been tweaking and finding the right plugins/widget to make it work for me. At the moment, the 2 sidebars are all using widgets and I’m liking it very much hehe.

My last “change” on this blog was 1st July last year when I changed it to a 3-column layout. Not sure if this will be an annual event yet hehe.

Let me know what you think.

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Today I’m gonna tell you about one of the best spam-fighting plugin I’ve found since I’ve upgraded this blog to v2.6. My spam queue under Akismet is zero and users who want to comment doesn’t have to do any captcha or solve any math formula too.

Sounds good? Yeah the name of the plugin is Yawasp – Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin. It has 2 main functions that fight these spambots.

First, all of the comment fields are changed every 24 hours. Here’s how my comment form looks like under the hood:

If you check your blog’s source code, the value for name would be “name”, mine above is jibberish to us but not to the plugin, which will revert it back to the original value for wordpress to process. These values are changed every 24 hours too. So in the meantime, the spambots will get confused.

The plugin does this to all fields in the form.

Another method it used is using a hidden field, which is hidden to the user but not to the spambots. So if this hidden field is filled, that means it didn’t come from a human so it’s automatically deleted.

Here’s my yawasp stats for the last 3 days.

Installation is a little bit technical as you need to change a few values inside your comment.php file. The plugin will first attempt to change your files automatically but I’ve tried this on 2 of my blogs without success. Since I work with codes daily I just manually change it following the instructions. If you’ve dirtied your hands with HTML before this shouldn’t be so hard.

Convinced? Visit the plugin website here.

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