My friend Andy, reading last Friday’s post, remarked no one should have to put up with crap like that. He’s right, and I mentioned that most contact forms don’t allow you to filter via your WordPress blacklists or comment moderation settings.
Surprised?
You should be.
Back in March 2014, I raised this with Jetpack, saying that the Feedback ignores Blacklists.
You have a moderation list and a blacklist.
You have a user you want to block from commenting forever. You add them to the blacklist. Surprise! They can still use the feedback form!
This should behave just like the blacklist on comments: It blackholes them. Done and gone. After all, you didn’t want them around.
Logically I can see why it doesn’t use the comment checks. If you have a check to only let users who have an approved comment, leave more comments freely, this would be a problem. There’s no ‘pending’ value for feedback.
And the first reply … Well it made me mad back then. I say this as someone who is good friends with the fellow who commented, but back in 2014, I wanted to smack the back of his head.
This would be super easy to get around, just changed the alleged from email address. Besides, blacklist tends to be things that shouldn’t be displayed publicly automatically, allowing contacts would let them appeal the blacklist.
I could see grounds for adding a filter to have grunion follow the commenting blacklist though. Less sold on an admin option.
Now go back and read last week’s post. I have not blacklisted the rather vile word used in that comment because I have a friend who is dyslexic and often says ‘cuntry’ instead of ‘country.’ It’s an honest mistake on her part. We added in an autocorrect to her phone and tablet. But blocking short words is hard. Still. The IP address? You bet that hit my blacklist.
If I still had a comment form, that moron could still harass me.
As I replied to George:
Sure, and it’s just as easy to get around the current blacklists in WP. The point is, though, if you’ve put someone’s email on your comment blacklist, the assumption can be made that you have a good reason. You DON’T want this person commenting on your site, so why are you making it easy for them to harass you? And yeah, I used ‘harass’ intentionally.
Certainly I can and do block their emails on the server, but I still have to go in and clean out the messages in feedback once and a while, and I for one get a lot of pretty vile garbage from people. So having one less place to have to read their BS would be beneficial.
It’s always been relatively easy to work around if you’re a dedicated troll, but if the blacklist just blackholed their contact messages, it does a lot for your mental health.
Because he’s right that a dedicated asshole will work around the blacklists. They do it today. Still, I feel there’s no reason to make it easier for them. And while I can block from a server level, not everyone has my skills. And for those people, should we not introduce Akismet level scans on feedback forms?
You see, the reason I was mad at George back then is his argument felt like he was saying “since it can be worked around, this is a bad idea.”
That is absolutely not what he meant.
Even if I didn’t know George well, I have simple proof he didn’t think this was a stupid idea, he thought it was an idea that begat caution. What proof? He didn’t close the issue. In fact, he gave it a milestone to review.
Now, sadly, it’s been two years with no traction. Every so often someone bumps the milestone, which means it’s among the 600+ tickets that need attention. But it lingers. It’s not a priority.
Jetpack and Akismet are both owned by the same company. If you have the Akismet plugin installed and activated, and have an active subscription, every form submission will be checked for spam.
They need to take it to the next level. So do all forms plugins. From what I can tell, Ninja Forms has a field simple spam prevention but no blacklists. Gravity Forms has an old, not-updated, 3rd party plugin for a Gravity Forms Email Blacklist.
In fact … the only contact form plugin I could find that actually uses WordPress’ built in blacklist would be Takayuki-san’s Contact Form 7.
Let us protect ourselves from abuse.
Now that you know all about the 
“Content farms” are the wave of the future, and Google calls them sites with “shallow or low-quality content.” The definition is vague, and basically means a content farm is a website that trolls the internet, takes good data from other sites, and reproduces it on their own. Most content farms provided automatically inserted data. There is no man behind the scenes manually scanning the internet for related topics and copy/pasting them into their site. Instead, this is all done via software known as content scrapers. The reasons why they do this I’ll get to in a minute, but I think that Google’s statement that they’re going to spend 2011 burning down the content farms is what’s got people worried about duplicate content again.
What Google is doing is not only laudable, but necessary. They are adapting to the change of how spam is delivered, and doing so in a way that should not impact your site. The only ways I can see this affecting ‘innocent’ sites are those blogs who use RSS feed scrapers to populate their sites. This is why anytime someone asks me how to do that, I either tell them don’t or I don’t answer at all. While I certainly use other news articles to populate my site, I do so my quoting them and crafting my own, individual, posts. In that manner I both express my own creativity and promotion the high quality of my own site. I make my site better. And that is the only way to get your site well-ranked. Yes, it is work, and yes, it is time consuming. Anything worth doing is going to take you time, and the sooner you accept that, the happier you will be.
I am not an SEO expert. In fact, there are only a handful of people whom I feel can claim that title without making me roll my eyes so hard I get a migraine. Anyone who tells you they have all the answers to get your site listed well in Google is a liar, because there’s only one good answer: Make a good site. That’s really it. How then do all those spam sites get listed in Google, Bing and Yahoo to begin with, and will the techniques the search engines are using to eradicate those sites hurt you?
You write a blog post and the content is stored in the database, along with any tags, catgories, or meta data you put in. When someone goes directly to the blog post, they see. However, they can also see the post if they go to a list of posts in that category, with that tag, on that date, in that year, etc etc and so on and so forth. So the question a lot of new webfolks ask is “Is that duplicate content?” No. It’s not. Nor is having ipstenu.org and ipstenu.org point to the same page. In fact, that’s good for your site. The more, valid, ways you have of providing your user with information, the easier it is for them to find what they want, and they happier they are. Happy users means repeat users, which means profit (in that oh so nebulous “web = profit” theory).
Google also makes the claim that since CMSs generally don’t handle duplicate content ‘well’ (their word, not mine), non-malicious duplication is common and fairly harmless, though it will affect search results. Here’s where things get sticky. Personally, I disagree with Google’s claim that CMSs handle duplicate content poorly. A well written CMS, knowing that no two people think the same way, takes that into consideration when crafting a site. You want an index, but if you know someone looks for things by subject matter or year, you need to have a way to provide that information for the reader. Google’s problem is that in doing so, you have also provided it for the GoogleBots who patrol your site and pull in the data for searches, which makes the dreaded duplicate content.
Thankfully, you can eliminate redundancy by providing Google with a sitemap of your website.(
I’ve talked about this before (