Google are working to try and curtail comment spam. Much of the weblog software out there will support the new rule.
What bugs me is that over the last 3 days I have recorded about 1000 spam comments that don’t even include a web address. Just random email addresses from different IPs, making inane comments about how good the weblog is. How do I blacklist that?
Comments
6 responses to “Comment spam update”
http://www.gudlyf.com/index.php?p=376
Gavin,
Twenty Major is correct – the AuthImage WordPress plugin is a godsend for stopping comment spammers.
As well as that, I found that re-naming the comments pages was an extremely easy and effective way of stopping the vast majority of spam – particularly the wp-comments-post.php page.
A neat trick then is to write a file called wp-comments-post.php which captures the IP address of direct accesses to wp-comments-post.php and write them to a block list in the .htaccess file!
Another tack is to increase the minimum time allowed between comments – the default is 10 seconds, I have increased the minimum time on my blog to 300 seconds.
Dunno if you saw this but Keith McDuffee – the author of the excellent AuthImage WordPress plugin has written another plugin to implement Google’s nofollow attribute – for more see http://www.gudlyf.com/
Tbh, there is no easy answer right now to comment spam, you have to take a multi-layered approach, so I think a combination of AuthImage, the file (and variable) re-naming, minimum comment time increasing and the nofollow plugin combined should go a long way to cutting down on the amount of spam you are receiving.
I wrote a bit about this in my blog recently and also last December when it was really exercising me, if you want more detail you can check that out or feel free to mail me directly.
Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Tom
Something that may be of use is well is a “Comment Moderation”. This can be found on the admin page. Go to “Options” and you can find it at the bottom of the “Discussion” tab. It allows you to enter keywords that automatically hold a comment for moderation. I have thrown in the usual sex lifestyle drug names.
The comment moderation built into wordpress becomes useless after you get deluged with thousands of comments in the space of a few hours. It becomes too time consuming to manually moderate. WP Blacklist automatically does that job, but only where URLs and static IPs are concerned. Keywords only have limited use. The authimage hack is something I looked at a few months back, samizdata have been using it for a quite a while. I will look into implementing it, cheers!
Don’t forget that you can change the minimum time allowed between comments – this is quite useful if you are being flooded with comment spam – there is a post about how to do this in WeblogTools, see – http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2004/07/07/more-comment-flood/
And as I said previously, renaming the wp-comments-post.php file cuts your comment spam drastically.
Having said all that, the only thing which completely eliminated it for me was Authimage!
Best of luck with it and let us know how you get on.
Cheers,
Tom
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