Slaying spambots
I had to take care of some mostly backend problems with this here blog recently. Some of you may be suffering from the same problems, so some of this might be helpful:
1. Comment spam really ramped up for me recently—six or more per day. I delete all of them immediately, and it was getting to be a pain in the ass, so I installed the AuthImage plugin for WordPress yesterday, and since then I haven’t had a single spam comment. The plugin seems pretty robust, so I doubt I’ll have any further problems with spam, at least of the comment variety. But it means you poor commenters will have to put in a four digit code for each comment. Sorry for the inconvenience. I did alter the plugin from its default requirement for six digits to four to decrease your burden. :) You other WP users who haven’t come up with your own solution for comment spam might want to give the plugin a try.
2. I’ve also been getting slammed with a buttload of referrer spam lately, so I’ve resorted to using .htaccess to stop the problem. Using an example blacklist from Joe Maller, I’ve made my own .htaccess that covers some of the newer spammers, including a rewrite condition I found here which covers the now common spam referrer domain structures such as word-word-whatever.com. For the past couple days, no referrer spam!
3. I upgraded my blog to the latest version of WP, so as soon as I can get the ViewLevel plugin, I’ll be adding a registration/login feature to loblogomy so that you can register a reader’s account to read private posts (basically, it will be similar to what the two erics do with their blogs). I can’t get the plugin right now, because, get this, the person who wrote it locked herself out of her office where her server crashed. Heh.
Fancy stuff :) I wonder how long (or if) spammers will resort to using the captcha breaking things out there like gimpy. It’s an arms race I guess :/
Hope the stuff works out for you better :)
A usability note for you - after you post a comment it returns you to your webpage, but within the comment window (read: you can’t see shit) - just fyi’n in case it’s b0rked :)
Ah, yes. I was going to fix that. Thanks for reminding me. :)
Hrm. Well, Something’s skwewy awound here. Can’t seem to fix that problem, so I’ve just turned off the popup for comments.
just ascertaining my humanity. :)
Referral spam and comment spam
Aaron posted some useful information on how to get rid of comment and referral spam. I’m not using Wordpress, so I am unable to use the AuthImage plugin, but I made my own filter that basically just checks words and counts hrefs, rejecting comments…
very useful/helpful info, i’ll certainly look into it. my current plugins aren’t bad, but this one looks to be even more effective
i’ve been getting a huge amount of comment spam in the past month or so, too. i’ve just been letting WP’s filters shunt anything with certain words which I won’t repeat here into the moderation pool, then I go through and do mass deletions every once in a while.
but … the authimage thing may be the way to go.
god spammers suck monkey balls. i mean, wtf? does any comment spam ever ever ever actually generate a sale for anyone?
Did you get the viewlevel plugin? I can’t get it anywhere and it’s frustrating. the “source” http://www.fuboma.org is down.
mail me or reply here, whatever you like best.
Thanks in Advance!
XepoX
No, I haven’t been able to get the plugin yet. Very frustrating, indeed!
I’d be interested to get your comments on a proposal I’ve written on methods to cut down on referral spam. I believe that fighting the spammers via htaccess is ultimately unwinnable and a waste of energy (although I’m currently doing it, since I have no alternative). Anyway, take a look.
Using .htaccess to deal with a recent flood of trackback ping spam
“Holy smokes, I’ve been hit! My comment spam ’secret code’ filter is working like a charm - no spam in weeks, but now they’ve decided to spam through trackback. The other day I had two new trackback pings on older…
Ah, yes. I was going to fix that. Thanks for reminding me. :)
Good blog
haha funny stuff
I thank you for your comment.