Spam is a constant problem for blog sites. Consequently, I tend to scour the WordPress Plugin site for anti-spam plugins. I currently use Akismet, and it works exceptionally well. Thank you very much, Akismet.
I think I’ve found another good one. From the http:BL site:
“The http:BL WordPress Plugin allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. Thanks to http:BL API you can quickly check whether your visitor is an email harvester, a comment spammer or any other malicious creature. Communication with verification server is done via DNS request mechanism, which makes the query and response even quicker. Now, thanks to http:BL WordPress Plugin any potentially harmful clients are denied from accessing your blog and therefore abusing it.”
After installing http:BL in my plugin folder, I discovered that my WordPress database needed a new table for the http:BL plugin to record its data. lunarpages.com provides access via cPanel to MySQL account maintenance. From the bottom of that page, I selected phpMyAdmin.
On the right sidebar, I selected my database, which in my case was worp1, and then selected Databases from the main page.
The names of my databases appeared next. I then selected the name of the database for which I wanted to add the table.
When the new page came up, it showed all of my current tables in my selected database.
At the bottom of this page, I chose Create new table on database. I typed in the name of the table I wanted to create, and the number of fields in my new table.
Fortunately, ht:BL has included a php file (I wasn’t able to run the script) – httpbl_log.sql – with the information I needed to create the database table
CREATE TABLE `wp_httpbl_log` (
`id` INT( 6 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`ip` VARCHAR( 16 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘unknown’ ,
`time` DATETIME NOT NULL ,
`user_agent` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘unknown’ ,
`httpbl_response` VARCHAR( 16 ) NOT NULL ,
`blocked` BOOL NOT NULL
from which I was able to glean the six field identifiers (id, ip, time, user_agent, httpbl_response, blocked) for the creation page that popped up next. From the above, I filled in the appropriate field information, and was sure to scroll to the far right to insert all of the field information in the form, especially the PRIMARY KEY identifier.
When I viewed the actual code for the routine I created, I saw that it added at the bottom of the routine, TYPE = MYISAM ; After comparing it to the existing database table types, I saw that it was correct for the type of database I had just created.
Upon completion, a new table (The table is working. I checked later in the day and found data written to the table. Success!) was inserted into my WordPress database.
That was simple, wasn’t it?