This wasn’t actually planned release, and it’s made out of necessity. I am very frustrated by the increasing number of spam registrations that my websites get, but once the spam registrations and spam blogs started to plague xScape info demo website, I decided to do something about that.
So, I spent my whole weekend on adding spam fighting power to GD Press Tools. I begun testing new version of the plugin 2 days ago, and I have added more filters and I made many tweaks and changes. Before I installed the new version of the plugin xScape.info website got 10-15 spam blogs each day, and on the weekends that number is even higher. But, ever since 3.6 version of plugin was uploaded, plugin prevented 95% of all spam registration requests. None of other legitimate registrations was prevented. And so far, plugin has only several filters added. Over time, more will be added to cover as much spam requests as possible.
So, what GD Press Tools 3.6 Pro does? New registrations settings tab is added. If you use WordPress MultiSite installations, this panel will be among global settings only for network administrators, if not it will be on normal settings panel. Previously available restriction username settings (keywords and minimal and maximal username length) are moved to this panel. Auto filter, auto banning and log options are added. Filter uses regular expressions to match spam usernames, emails and user agents on user/blog registrations pages. If matched, IP, username or email can be automatically blocked. IP can even be used to prevent access not only to registration/login page, but to whole website.
Next versions will get panel to manage registrations, banned IP’s and other data and to fine tune what you need to do to minimize spam on your website. There is no way to have 100% success in spam fighting, but filtering most of it without much work is something we surely need. With recently added user prune and more security related features to be added, GD Press Tools Pro is an essential plugin for any blog. I will publish a video tutorial explaining implications of using these features in the next day or two.
GD Press Tools Pro, no longer works with WordPress 2.7, as it was announced last week, you need at least WordPress 2.8. There are many more changes to settings panel, many tweaks and changes all over.
