skippy dot net

Thanks for the heads-up. The link is fixed.

Owen: Absolutely! Impostercide was written to cover an exposure that was never abused, so I can't even claim that it's an "itch-scratch" solution. But knowing that the exposure was there was enough to prod me into action. I'd be delighted to collaborate on a more comprehensive plugin.

Bob:

Registered users who make comments & reference any of the above are asked to log in and their comment ends fatally.

As long as a registered user hasn't logged out (by clicking the "Logout" link inside the admin interface), WordPress should recognize their cookie, and their comment should be approved by Impostercide as legitimate (though other moderation restrictions may still be applied). There's no login button anywhere here because I'm the only one who needs an account. I don't have guest authors, and I don't require users to be logged in to comment. As such, a login link would be clutter in my design. I could include a link to the login form, but I don't for two reasons: one) logging in takes the user to their profile page in WordPress, which would mean extra clicking to get back to the post permalink and comment entry form; and two) I want the user to be able to click their browser's back button so that they can copy their comment to their machine's clipboard, so that they aren't required to key it in again.

Bob: correct. WordPress has basically three classes of people: commenters, users and authors. Most people combine users and authors into the same logical group, allowing their users to author posts (often used for things like Free-For-All Friday). WordPress supports an option to require commenters to be signed-in users. This is one means to prevent comment spam. A nice side-effect of this is that there's no comment spoofing: the signed-in user posts her comment under her account. Many bloggers want to allow comments from people without requiring them to register on the blog. Some allow completely anonymous commenting; others require that commenters at least provide an email address as a modest anti-spam mechanism. In these scenarios, though, there's nothing in the default WordPress code to prevent an anonymous commenter from supplying the name, email, or URI of a registered user or author, which means that you could write all manner of nasty stuff and make it look as though I wrote it. It doesn't matter that I'd delete it quickly -- the fact that someone might see it and think that I wrote it was motivation enough for me to create Impostercide!