Last Sunday my blog sent me a handful of comments to moderate. Normally I don’t mind because even on a bad day Akismet catches nearly every spam comment and I can deal with the rest in less time than it takes to bring my blood to a boil. But when I have to deal with comments from people who have not read the article, whether they are spammers or trolls or some other form of internet asshole, it’s a whole other heating element.
The solution is Quiz, a WordPress plugin that I wrote while enjoying a pot of coffee on Sunday. With Quiz installed, comments don’t even come to moderation unless the commentator has correctly answered a question in the comment form.
Authors can write a new question for each blog article just by typing a shortcode into the article, like this:
[quiz What is your quest? to seek the holy grail]
This secret shortcode will never be shown to visitors. (It is safely stored in postmeta.) If you publish without a quiz shortcode, your article will use the default question which you can specify by editing the plugin. There is also a shortcode to override the default: [noquiz]
Quiz is free. It could be made easier to use. If you are interested in improving it, email me for SVN access.
Pass Quiz to Comment
Last Sunday my blog sent me a handful of comments to moderate. Normally I don’t mind because even on a bad day Akismet catches nearly every spam comment and I can deal with the rest in less time than it takes to bring my blood to a boil. But when I have to deal with comments from people who have not read the article, whether they are spammers or trolls or some other form of internet asshole, it’s a whole other heating element.
The solution is Quiz, a WordPress plugin that I wrote while enjoying a pot of coffee on Sunday. With Quiz installed, comments don’t even come to moderation unless the commentator has correctly answered a question in the comment form.
Authors can write a new question for each blog article just by typing a shortcode into the article, like this:
This secret shortcode will never be shown to visitors. (It is safely stored in postmeta.) If you publish without a quiz shortcode, your article will use the default question which you can specify by editing the plugin. There is also a shortcode to override the default: [noquiz]
Quiz is free. It could be made easier to use. If you are interested in improving it, email me for SVN access.