While moderating comments on my most active site today I became annoyed at the number of people who leave comments with obviously fake email addresses. I haven’t gone to the extent of requiring people to validate their comment by sending them an email like other sites have– however it is something I’ve considered. This gave me the idea to write a very simple WordPress Plugin… No MX Records, no comment.
So here is how this will work. Visitor leaves a comment. The plugin checks the domain of the email address and looks to see if the address has a valid MX record. If the domain doesn’t have any MX records, the comment is placed into the Spam queue.
There are many issues with this approach to be aware of. If someone makes a typo with their email it will likely end up in the spam queue. Sometimes people (stupidly) don’t have an MX record associated with their domain and those will get dumped into the spam queue as well. But if someone leaves an obviously fake email address like nobody@example.com then those will end up in the spam queue and that is what I’d like.
Note that since I moderate first time commenters I couldn’t simply hold those comments for moderation– thus the spam queue. And since I use spam filtering techniques that don’t allow spam to even get into the spam queue the only messages I end up with in the queue are these emails. So what I’m saying is “this works for me”.
Note that this plugin is not designed to combat comment spam. Do I need to say it again? It does NOT combat spam. It simply provides insight with people who comment leaving email addresses which are not likely valid.
The whole thing is about 10 lines long and I’ll add it to the WP Plugins Directory when it is ready.
