Kevin's Weblog

While wading through the hundreds of comment spams that got through Akismet, I noticed a common pattern that explains why other people don’t seem to be seeing such a severe deluge. The commenter name in all cases was “ ”. At first I thought this was a bug where writebacks didn’t recognize pure whitespace as an empty name, but when I went and looked at the code I found that even though the default templates suggest that some fields are required and others optional, in reality the code doesn’t check to make sure anything is there.

The fix was relatively simple and I hacked it out last night and I haven’t seen any spam get through since (versus about 350 yesterday). The fixed version is released as writeback_akismet-0.0.2