Jim Skamarakas

In a continuing effort to make comments easier and better for my blogs, I started reviewing comment options. This means comment poster images, threaded comments and comment spam protection if anything is needed above AKISMET which is a must have.

I was looking for a CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress and found Captcha! which the author is no longer using. Instead they are using WP Hashcash http://wordpress-plugins.feifei.us/hashcash/ This plugin has some interesting potential until you read the comments on the plugin page at the authors site. There you find out that the author enabled version checking rather then version checking when you are in the plugin administration page. This makes hashcash a huge performance issue on busy sites and a problem if there is ever a communications issue with the authors backend. The code also apparently makes non standard WordPress calls using the existing code functions. It also has a requirement not documented. And what if the end user cannot post a comment? Nothing, it just goes to the bit bucket after they type and lose their work. Pissing off a user is far worse then deleting spam.

How do I know all this? By reading the comments which are not rebutted or noted as corrected by the author. They may be all bogus or 100% accurate. But I don’t want to find out myself if the author is not mainting the plug-in or responding to comments months old.

Always read the comments for plug-ins before installing. And skip over the rainbow sprinkles comments about how great it works. Instead look for the problems and issues and see who replies to them as either end user errors or plugin problems, and when they get fixed. The world’s greatest plugin without support is worse, far worse, then a plug-in where the author and or other users support it.

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Categories: technology
Tags: software