This is far and away the best contact form plugin there is. The reason? configurability. You can easy build literally anything with it. We’ve built out employment application forms, wedding checklists, and more for clients. It also drives our own quote form. There’s also built in spam protection, via question and answer or captcha.

If you need a contact form , or any kind of form (share this via email, file upload, schedule request, etc), go use Cforms.

The issue that most of these services seems to be trying to mediate is "truthiness" or "authority".  Assigning some sort of integer to the value that a commenter typically brings to a discussion.  The first such plugin that I tried was Buddycards, which were relatively non-invasive as far as layouts go.  The problem being that not enough people use the 30boxes service, or were willing to create another profile just to have an identity to map to their truthiness.

The next one I tried (that I remember) was SezWho.  All of my comments were imported there, so that users can claim their comments here, to obtain better karma elsewhere.  Disqus followed later this year, you can claim your comments at archgfx.disqus.com.   The problem with both of these is that the company's entire business revolves around comment authority, which is inherently tarnished by a profit motive.  If we can't trust the company, how can we map real trustworthiness to their scale of authority?

Centralized anti-spam services play largely the same game, and indeed disqus appropriately cuts out Akismet, Defensio, or any local spam prevention measures.  Ultimately, anti-spam services don't try (yet) try to merge disparate communities.  That's the biggest problem I see with comment authority - The authority I would have on a music blog is different from the authority I might have on a tech blog.  The comments I might leave on a feminist blog would be little more than conjecture or anecdote.

Ultimately, the reason that I, and most people choose to run our own blogging app, instead of using a hosted service like wordpress.com or blogspot, is that we don't want to be dependant on the standards and defaults of a larger, authoritarian group.  By removing the ability to customize, and normalizing the authority of commenters, commenting services like disqus take away the things I like about having my own blog, even while they attempt to mitigate the unpleasant elements of spam and trolls.  Anonymity and decentralization are linchpins in the present nature of the internet.

I haven't bothered installing Intense Debate or JS-Kit yet, because each new plugin from a non-reputable source is another security risk, as I allow it to rummage through my database for comment information, and email addresses of people who wordpress assured wouldn't be shared.

Defensio launched their public beta today. I've been part of the private beta for a couple months now, after openly criticizing Akismet. Defensio is a similar tool, so it does fall prey to the same "wisdom of crowds" weaknesses. Defensio's usability far outstrips SK2¹ and Akismet², and the launch of the website improves it a bit. Now there's an RSS feed for my spam. Granted, that's a little strange, but it's better than SK2's digest emails, which untrain google's filters by passing along spam content inside legitimate emails. I like having a choice in anti-spam measures, and especially one that's upfront about its accuracy, and that's cognizant of the need to police your own quarantine. Here's a couple screenshots to give you an idea of what it looks like:

1. gouge my eyes out ugly (back ↩)
2. requires plugins upon plugins to be usable (back ↩)

I've been wondering why my site fares so well in google searches for slayer, but my post about slayer gets zero traffic. Apparently it's some danish idiot hotlinking the photo (see chart). And a couple myspace idiots, not realizing that I got the original from myspace, and hotlinking mine, rather than using the original properly.

So far, I'm realizing that the hotlink ban doesn't prevent the danish forum from from poluting my logs. I'm also having difficulty determining if the block is actually working. for everything else, though, the logs work amazingly. Especially at catching my typos.

The .htaccess rules I'm using are:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ddforum\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g)$ /images/hotlink.$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Which seems to only make the hotlinked image go away, not actually replace it with my south-park-plus-web2.0-gradient image. boo.

So, after some 20-odd months and 25 thousand spams, I'm switching off of akismet. sort of. Spam Karma is great, but akismet still has a few tricks up its sleeve. There's a plugin¹ to use akismet as part of spam karma. so if you have trouble commenting, send an email to wp-admin [at] archgfx [dot] net².

I miss the "set it and forget it" of akismet, but that was kind of a pipe dream. SK2 is excessively fiddly, but on the other (far less popular) journals i use it on, it hasn't required any fiddling. Here, unfortunately, it requires a lot of fiddling, since the plugin defaults to a +7 karma for an akismet false positive. since akismet's accuracy is about 50/50 these days, that just doesn't make sense. So i turned down the strength of that plugin, and turned up the strength of SK as a whole.

1. a plugin for a plugin, i know, how fiddly can you get. (back ↩)
2. or, courtesy of NoWickedWitch, you can message me on Pownce (back ↩)