I always had problems with using blocking lists (or blacklists) for my blog. I tried many different ones and they just simply blocked too many legitimate visitors. The latest attempt was also a failure.
Back in April, I wrote Move Over Akismet, A New Sheriff Is In Town, referring to the new blocking list available from Project Honey Pot.
In May, I wrote about it again and where to get the new plugin for it in The http:BL WordPress Plugin, Another Anti-Spam Measure, again in I’m Getting Zero Spam Comments, and yet again in Updated: http:BL and Simple Spam Filter.
A few days ago, I received email from a couple of different people saying that they were being redirected to my honey pot page when they tried to access my blog. It didn't take an anvil falling on my head to realize that something was wrong. The blocking list was blocking legitimate visitors. I checked the log and yes, their IPs were blocked. I quickly disabled the plugin to see if that solved the problem and it did. I decided to leave it disabled to see if it would make a difference in how many spam comments ended up being caught by Akismet. Guess what? The Simple Spam Filter for WordPress blocked almost everything. In the past two days, the only spam comments being caught by Akismet were those that were pure gibberish (designed to fool spam filters). Only two legitimate comments showed up in the Akismet section and it was easy enough to mark them as not spam and allow them to be posted.
I made a mistake in believing that Project Honey Pot had a cleaner blocking list than the others. I won't make that mistake again. I always believed it was better to filter than to block and this recent fiasco confirmed that belief. I can only imagine how many legitimate visitors were blocked that didn't send me email. If they couldn't access my blog to see my contact page, how would they even know what my email address was?
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