WordPress Comment Spam
I’ve been having a lot of problems with comment spam lately. Perhaps not as much as some people, but it’s a bit of a pain none the less. I’ve had comment moderation turned on for several weeks, but this is a pain for people who leave real comments as their message won’t appear straight away.
Anyway, I’ve found what look to be good solutions. The simplest is to rename your ‘wp-comments-post.php’ file to something else. It seems some spam-bots are rather cunning though, and they actually take the time to parse your comment form, so this won’t work in all instances.
There is a load of stuff in the WP forum on this subject, so I won’t go over it all again here.
Having said that, I think that Rob Novak’s Spider Trap is worth a mention for its sheer cunning. Some people believe IP banning is a waste of time though - and I’m inclined to agree with them.
Finally, you should take a good look at what is perhaps the definitive list of WordPress anti-spam tactics.
Right, my tea should be well brewed now 
Time for breakfast.
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November 23rd, 2004 10:50
They’re still at it! I’ve added Gudfly’s WP AuthImage hack/plugin. Lets see if that helps…
November 23rd, 2004 13:46
build your own CMS, works for me…
November 23rd, 2004 14:27
That’s fine if you’ve got the time!
November 24th, 2004 22:24
My spider trap isn’t really about simple IP-banning. Well, it is sort-of, but not as a permanent, long-term solution. The mechanics of it are founded on two elements of the architecture: a) any spammer is forced to brute-force crawl the site, and are funnelled into the trap right quick, and b) the IP ban effectively kills that session - immediately and without any interaction on my part. It’s an amazingly effective trap-door solution.
I clean out the .htaccess file on a regular basis, and even quicker if I see in the alerter email that the source address was that of a large ISP’s proxy. That being said, 99% of my hits aren’t from ISP proxies. The bottom line is that the mechanism is very effective and totally unobtrusive to the end user - it doesn’t require entering cryptic strings, validating comments, or maintaining user accounts or whitelists. I’m running it on four sites, and they’re all blissfully comment-spam free.
Thanks for the link.
November 25th, 2004 17:59
teeheehee…. the beauties of having your own comments system *grin* *winks and runningtings*
November 25th, 2004 19:53
If only I had time to wite my own comments system. Nah, what’s the point re-inventing the wheel where there are perfectly good systems out there already?
The only reasons I can see for someone to write their own blogging software are:
1) if they want to simply as a challenge (and they have the time) - still not a good argument,
2) they want to learn a language like PHP and need a project to learn it with.
3) They really have specialist needs (and you don’t Ox!)