Anyone who runs a wordpress blog (and I suspect a number of other blogging tools) would be aware that as soon as your get any sort of notoriety on the web, you start to get hit by comment spammers.
These are automated scripts that seek out blogs or forums, and place messages that almost always contain one or more links to sites advertising drugs, gambling or the labour party.
I can’t speak for other tools, but wordpress handles this pretty well. I’m still on 1.5, so can’t speak for how it works in 2.0 (that’s a discussion for another day) but the fix is pretty simple.
Go to ‘Options > Discussion’
In the ‘Comment Blacklist’ section at the bottom of the base you can chuck phrases that will permanently block any comment with that phrase. I went through a process of putting the drug names in, until I realised that the best solution was to put ‘[/url]‘ in. This piece of code is almost always put into the spam so that the link appears in phpBB forums that use this format.
However, in wordpress it doesn’t do anything, so no real comment would ever put this in.
It’s working quite well for me. We had 18 spam comments overnight, that otherwise would have had to be manually removed (from moderation). Happy spam killing.
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2 comments
db says:
September 1, 2006 at 3:18 pm (UTC 13 )
Good to hear it’s working so well for you. I use Spam Karma myself:
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
It’s a plugin that basically requires no setup or configuration at all, and starts blocking spam with a pretty much 100% success rate automatically. You might want to give it a look if your spammers start to diversify.
Also, upgrading to 2.0 is pretty easy and has lots of security fixes! Not to mention other improvements. Highly recommended!
Pete says:
September 1, 2006 at 4:07 pm (UTC 13 )
Cheers for the link and advice. I’ll keep it mind, though spammers don’t seem to be big on intelligence or originality. It’s hard for me to justify the effort of moving to 2.0. I haven’t had any security issues (though I suppose it could happen any time) and the sites I run pretty much look the way I want them to. Maybe though. I’ll keep that in mind too.