Damn the government anyway. They take a simple thing and make it so fracking complex that people with ordinary intelligence will have no clue as to what’s best for them. I’d betcha a lot of retirees get taken to the cleaners by the insurance companies.

Outlook is an email system, and I think you’ve gotten off the track looking into email anti-spam plugins.

I should have been way more specific. We’re looking for a plugin for WordPress, something that, in this case, would look at each submitted post and comment and try to determine whether it’s spam. The determination of spamishness should result in the message being held for a human to review, rather than automatic deletion.

Most but not all of the available plugins should be registered with WordPress and searchable in their catalog at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. I think a plugin has to be free to get into the official catalog, so what you’d find searching elsewhere is likely to be commercial and require baksheesh.

Our minimum technical standard is that a plugin has to be tested to work with WordPress 3+. Other than that I’ll have to judge each candidate on a case by case basis. Don’t feel pressured to pick the perfect plugin right away. The most helpful thing you can do is winnow the list to a handful that look promising to you, and then let me check ‘em out technically.

Thanks for taking this on, Eri. Sorry the first effort wasn’t on-track, that’s my fault for not briefing you before you set out on your quest. Please take a look at WordPress’s catalog; I’ll be interested to see what you find.

As Robert said in the thread below, the captcha method is currently pretty effective in blocking automated spamming. It does not prevent the hiring of cheap labor to bypass the simple captcha.

More and more complex captchas can be used to discourage the human spammers.

I am not aware of any programs that can block a determined spammer.

All locks are made to admit certain people and any website that allows online access by a broad base of individuals is passing out keys to strangers.

There is no way to stop it. You can only slow it down and hope they don’t have sufficient reason to ruin your website and will look for easier pickings.

The human spammers that bypass captchas are paid for piecework. Their employer does not tell them to spam the Zone. They just pay them $ X for X spams. Our simple captcha means that as long as there are sites without captchas they are easier money. If we chose to use a more complex captcha, we might stop them entirely but we would also be effectively blocking potential new members. I have personally given up registering at a few sites after resetting the captcha 2-3 times without getting it right.

You will notice that those complex captchas are on high traffic sites that the spammers WILL be directed to and where they probably command a higher per piece rate.

Anyhow, the better the methods to block them, the better they will become at defeating those methods.

No doubt there are experts that know a lot more than me.

And…

Caveat: Some of what I have written above is based on educated guessing