I've been poking at a plugin on this site for a while that stops spam without sending the contents of comments to an external service for processing.

I don't get a lot of comments on this site, and I don't leave a lot of comments elsewhere, but I like the idea of comments in general and I think I would engage more if I enjoyed the tools more. I think having a good commenting system would be a fun addition to WordPress.

This post has been sitting as a draft for over 2 years now and I don't remember why I didn't just hit publish at the time. I'm no longer at WSU, but I do still agree with what I wrote, so here you go!

For a long time I've had the path to xmlrpc.php blocked completely on a handful of sites so that I didn't have to worry about Things. One thing that this messes with, if you don't have Jetpack installed, is the WordPress mobile app. Without a WordPress.com connection, the mobile application relies on the XML-RPC API provided by your WordPress.

I stumbled backwards into this and didn't see it discussed anywhere else yet, so here's a path for anyone else finding themselves temporarily confused and internet searching.