We received an interesting comment in the site the other day about the anti-spam options that we incorporate into the Issue Tracker component.   The main gist was that Recaptcha was the only anti-spam option that we use.   However we had to reply that there were also other features such as word filtering, IP blocking, checks on the number of links, and the ability to ban specified email addresses and URLs.

We have (and still are) considering other options but do wonder whether it is the best approach to build all of these tools into a specific product such as Issue Tracker.   A typical Joomla site will have a number of components such as a Blog, a forum, a general article commenting system, etc., installed.   Other web sites even if not based on Joomla will have similar constituents.  Is it wise to have all of these parts with their own separate anti-spam measures?  The likelihood is that they will all adopt slightly different approaches with different measures of success, and all requiring updates to keep up with new techniques and methods.

 

Our own site(s) is/are no different and instead decided that a better approach, which we ourselves use and strongly recommend is to use something more site wide, to effectively filters out 'bad' input for all components on the site, rather than have each separate component performing the same task.  We have mentioned such a product before and will not repeat it here again, suffice to say have a look at some of our older blog entries.

Of course not everyone would necessarily agree and we therefore do include anti-spam measures in our products, and we try to make use of standard ‘Joomla’ supplied features such as the Recaptcha (standard in Joomla 2.5) but hesitate to implement yet another interface to a product such as Akismet.  Which is not to say that products such as Akismet are not very good at what they do, just that just how many calls interfaces does a site really need and what a lot of duplication?