Apparently the spam comment field for Wordpress is quite large. All the more space to get spammed with, apparently. Not anymore. If you enter a comment longer than 16K your comment will be immediately trashed. So there.

I don’t expect this to impact normal users that want to leave comments on my blog. And I have not kept any statistics as to how many comments exceed that limit. (I am going to, though, starting tonight.) I do know that I had at least a few over that limit within the past few days.

If you are a regular reader of my blog you know that last week I started tweaking the Wordpress code to make it easier to avoid comment spam. Akismet is doing a nice job, but I would rather just reject stuff before it even gets that far. So far I have added a checkbox that must be marked in order to leave a comment, and a few other items that I have not detailed in a post. Rejecting oversized comments is just another fairly easy step to take.

For example, for the 24 hours of November 30 I got 27 comments that were rejected because they failed to click the confirm checkbox. There were also 16 comments that went through and were either valid, or were trapped by Akismet. Many of those were extremely large posts, so my new code should be good enough to reject them, without really impacting a typical comment that a normal user might leave.

And so the battle continues.