Tag: spam

WordPress Fights Spam

Nick MomrikLeave a comment

As I mentioned on Friday, I had deactivated my spam prevention plugins. It’s been about 60 hours, but all of spam fighting techniques that are built into WordPress are working extremely well.

One thing I noticed however was pingbacks automatically being approved. I had trackbacks moderated by a plugin I wrote, but otherwise they would have been approved also. Since they weren’t from sites in my link list, they should have been going to moderation. Well, this morning I took a browse through the code for 1.5.1 (I’m using the latest and greatest) and I found a bug with pingback and trackback white listing. WP was marking every PB and TB as white listed. It wasn’t ever possible for them to not be white listed, so I fixed the code and submitted a patch. Now I’ve even deactivated my Moderate Trackback plugin since I don’t need it either.

MtDewVirus and 2 Hole Cards are now completely free of all spam prevention plugins. I keep a few there for emergencies, but they aren’t activated at the moment.

If you’re curious about my settings in WP, here they are:

  1. Anyone can register = OFF
  2. Users must be registered and logged in to comment = OFF
  3. An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below) = OFF
  4. Comment author must fill out name and e-mail = ON
  5. Comment author must have a previously approved comment = ON
  6. Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than 5 links.
  7. Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies = ON
  8. Comment Moderation words = NONE
  9. Comment Blacklist words – I do have 7 words listed here. Contact me if you want them.

That’s all there is to it.

Trackback Spammers Are Back

Aside Nick MomrikLeave a comment

The trackback spammers are back in full force. When I checked my email this morning I had over 180 and it’s continuing through the morning at a rate of several per minute. Talk about a pain in the ass! Don’t they realize that their info isn’t every getting onto the site. It’s getting flagged and […]

WordPress Plugins: Trackback And Pingback Moderation

Nick Momrik42 Comments

These two plugins basically do the same thing, but I wanted to keep them seperate. When you turn one on, it will automatically place either all NEW trackbacks or all NEW pingbacks (depending on the plugin) into the comment moderation queue. It’s meant as a simple way to keep the spammers from getting these onto your site without you first approving them.

Note: This does not do anything for all of the old trackbacks/pingbacks that have already been added to your site.

More information on the WordPress Plugins page.

Trackback Spam

Nick Momrik3 Comments

Now that I’ve gotten a handle on the comment spam taking over my blogs, I’m getting hit through other means. Trackbacks! I found a few hooks in the WP code that I can plug into, so tonight I plan to whip up a few plugins so that pingbacks and trackbacks can automatically be put into the moderation queue. At least that’s what I hope to accomplish.

I can’t really think of any other way to test on these two items. For comments, I don’t like using the moderation queue, but it doesn’t really matter all that much to me if a trackback or pingback doens’t appear on my blog for a few hours until I can let it go through. Maybe one of the great minds out there will come up with an idea, but this will at least be a temporary solution.

Stop The Comment Spam

Nick Momrik1 Comment

Hopefully comment spam is a thing of the past. I want to apologize to anyone who has attempted to comment recently and has been redirected to the FBI’s site. I think my comment spam checking system was going a little haywire from all of the spammers and it was flagging some of you that were attempting to leave legitimate comments. I hope the new system I’ve implemented will fix the problem. Please let me know if you ever have any problems commenting on any of my sites.

WordPress Comment SPAM Plugins

Nick Momrik3 Comments

I’m now using two plugins to help me combat comment SPAM. The first is Kitten’s Spam Words, which gives you an easy way to delete comments and mark them as spam at the same time. This helps to create a list of comment spam words in WordPress so that further comments will automatically be held for moderation. The second plugin is Mark Ghosh‘s Three Strikes Spam Protection. This plugin will automatically delete a comment if it matches a certain number of criteria (default is 3 strikes) so that I don’t even have to moderate them. It’s configurable so that you can set the number of “strikes” to delete a comment with.

SPAM Comments

Nick Momrik3 Comments

After some recent flooding of SPAM comments on all of my blogs I’ve started to take some preventive measures. I have much mor work to do, I’ve started flagging a few things. In the future, if you notice that when you comment it doesn’t show up right away, you’ve probably used a word or something I have flagged and I’ll approve your comment as soon as I can. I’m actually suprised I went almost an entire year without running into a problem, besides one or two a month. Let’s all wish a slow and painful death to all spammers, but a quick one to their SPAM!

Ultimate SPAM Filter

Aside Nick MomrikLeave a comment

Lately the SPAM coming through to my work email address has dropped off considerably. Well…today while troubleshooting a problem with my email I found out that I was blocking all email from the svsu.edu domain. Nearly 400 messages had been blocked so far…whoops!

Comment SPAM Protection

Nick Momrik4 Comments

I just installed a hack by Mark (Laughing Lizard) on my site to filter comments. Believe it or not, there are people out there that will visit blogs and post comments advertising viagra or other such things. This hack is designed to help prevent this from happening. If an address or certain words are recognized, the comment will be marked and will not appear until I allow it too. So it adds a level of moderation, which should keep me protected. Most of you shouldn’t even notice this in action and your comments should go through right away. If they don’t, I’ll get to allowing them as soon as I can.