Sudden flood of spam

I have been using Conditional Captcha for quite a long time and left a 5-star positive review.

Then, after the latest update, suddenly comments posted automatically to our web site, without being manually moderated, as our policy had been. [Hint: There are other reasons besides avoiding commercial spam for manual moderation.]

I checked and saw that under “Settings/Discussion” the check box before “Comment must be manually approved” was unchecked.

I thought that our site had been compromised! But I turned moderation back on.

Then I found that 100’s of comments ended up in our Spam folder, as they used to do before Conditional Captcha.

So I checked Akismet: All green.

I checked Conditional Captch and encountered this message:

Warning: the following WordPress discussion settings take priority over this plugin and will prevent it from displaying a CAPTCHA. It is recommended that you turn them off by unchecking the boxes below.

Before a comment appears:

Comment must be manually approved

That effectively means that we must choose between Conditional Captcha and moderation of our blog. [Hint: Conditional Captcha is not a substitute for intelligent moderators!]

I am SO DISAPPOINTED that Conditional Captcha is no longer useful for us! We used it to dispose of spam comments so they would not clutter up our spam folder. And it worked marvelously until the latest update. And I recommended the Akisment+Conditional Captch combination as the ideal spam solution on a number of discussion boards.

Why did you change the behavior of Conditional Captcha to disallow manual moderation of non-spam comments???

If you cannot or will not change the behavior back to what it used to be, the plugin is useless to us, and we need to look for another.

And, of course, I’ll have to amend my review. 🙁

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-conditional-captcha/