Spam reduced to one tenth by using WP blacklisting
The other day I wrote about the ability to blacklist words in WordPress. I’ve reduced the comment spam to maybe a tenth of what it was before by using that feature.
Most prefer Akismet to the blacklisting, so most of you may want to check that out instead.
And blacklisting words may result in missed comments, if the authors can’t figure out a way to rephrase their comments. So it’s risky.
But it’s also satisfying…
May 20th, 2006 at 2:06 am
About a week ago the comment spam hitting my custom Content Management System became much harder to control with a blacklist.
Spammers started using public access sites.
First I got spamments from bravenet.com accounts, and now I’m getting some from cgispy.com. Blacklist systems like mine — which look for blacklisted strings within link URLs — can only either block all the spam URLs individually or disallow the entire domain.
Have you noticed this development too?
May 20th, 2006 at 2:56 am
The good thing about the WP blacklisting is that I can blacklist words. And no matter where they appear in the comment, the comment won’t be allowed.
May 20th, 2006 at 5:18 am
I have quite a few words in the spam list in WP, based on the codec information.
In addition to that I got SK2 running.
I noticed that BB2.x beta version is extrememly effective in blocking spam. My spam has gone down to almost zero since I installed it.
Only downside is that it is heavier on the database.
May 20th, 2006 at 7:06 am
You have to be careful when you blacklist based on words. Some spammy words you enter may also match on legitimate words such as:
c i a l i s - bans s p e c i a l i s t
s c a t - bans s c a t t e r
h o o t e r - bans s h o o t e r s
For a pretty big and well thought out list, see what Jwalling has setup. I don’t particularly like this kind of filtering since it is much more prone to error than a URL blacklist, but if careful it could prevent all but the URL only or random text spam.
You may notice I had to space out those words, that is because this post was silently blocked otherwise.
May 20th, 2006 at 8:36 am
I personaly don’t use WP but have on my server a bunch of sites using guestbooks, CMS systems, bloging systems, etc…
What I used for blocking spam on those sites is mod_security v2 (the development version). It includes a DNSBL lookup feature. This feature is very effective in blocking comment spam or link dumpers.
May 21st, 2006 at 4:52 pm
I think the Akismet plugin (www.akismet.com) is a god send for WordPress blogs. I haven’t had a single comment spam since I’ve started using it, and no false positives either.
Maybe you might want to try that as well. You do need the Wordpress API key to use it though.
May 23rd, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Akismet works well, but I did have a two comment spams get through since the time I added it. (This is 2 out of 10s of thousands of spam attempts.) I added the SK2 Akismet plugin primarily to auto delete many of the spams; that leaves fewer to check for false positives.
I have noticed the overwhelming majority of my trackback spams writes each hyperlink twice, once in html and one in bbs forum code. If your trackback spam looks like mine, adding [url= as a word in the WP moderation block would probably catch a huge amount of trackback spam.
May 31st, 2006 at 8:25 am
I want fuck you….)
in your fat ass)))
thanks!