I've been a fan of Joe Tan's Simple Spam Filter (SSF) almost since the day it was created. Regardless of that fact, it has some shortcomings that need to be fixed and I don't think I'm the person to do it. I just shot a message over to Stephen Cronin of More Than Scratch the Surface to see if his plate is full or not. He's the author of the DualFeeds plugin, which I use and the IFrameWidgets plugin, which I don't (because my theme doesn't have widget support).

Joe Tan conceived the SSF as a pre-filter for the Akismet plugin, which is bundled with WordPress. As a pre-filter, it stops comments from spambots that try to add comments containing common spam words like cialis, viagra and words I don't care to publish as open text. It scans the comment text, but not the comment headers. It uses Perl regular expressions to pluck the words from the text. Regular expressions are powerful when they're used in the way they're designed, but the average person can't make heads or tails of them. I believe the PHP functions of strstr or stristr (case sensitivity being the difference) would be better suited for finding words as well as complete phrases.

I don't have anything against Joe Tan, but he doesn't respond to comments well and I have yet to get a response to an email message I sent him. Of course, I can't be certain he received it. One item he didn't respond to in comments was the fact that some of the comment spam contains the same text in the comment author field as the first line of the comment text. It's pretty easy to spot but SSF doesn't check for it. Other comments that seem to pop up a lot are comments that end in "…" (an ellipsis). It's a special HTML character (…) that no one in their right mind would type as comments, even if they could.

The plugin doesn't block comments; it merely requires you to confirm that you want to post that spammy word in your comments. It's a "sanity check" (in Joe's own words) to prevent the most common spam from getting through. It'll greatly reduce the amount of comments that appear in the Akismet filter results, saving a whole lot of time. I'm asking for someone to rewrite it to make it even better. Most of the spam showing up on my Akismet filter pages are those that I've mentioned, since the others have already been whacked by the plugin as it is. I would rewrite it myself, but I don't have the patience to test it and knowing myself, I would do something catastrophic and end up wiping out my blog or something.

Stephen isn't the only one who writes good plugins; he's just the first person that came to mind. I don't think his feelings would be hurt by anyone else stepping up to the plate and taking a swing at it. Are you up to the challenge?

• I Gave Up and Installed the WP-Ban Plugin
• I'm in Need of a WordPress Plugin
• The Final Word on Comment Spam
• Some Spammers Are Too Funny!
• Why Your WordPress Blog Isn't Receiving Pings