Spam, spam, spam, spam.
The main motivator for my upgrade to WP1.5 was the amount of comment spam I’ve been getting lately. Hundreds a day; thankfully, they’ve almost all been held for moderation, but it was still a pain in the proverbial to have to manually delete hundreds of comment spams every day. Wordpress 1.5 handles it much better, allowing me to handle all the spam in bulk instead of requiring a transaction for each item. It’s still annoying, but much less of a hindrance.
One thing it does still bj0rk up, however, is my stats tracking. I’m getting so many hits a day from the comment spams that actual site readers get lost in the high noise-to-signal ratio. So – if you’re still out there, still reading? Hi. :)
September 29th, 2005 at 12:25 am
Rest assured, there are answers.
Firstly, there is the Spam Karma plugin. This thing is gold. It assigns negative points to a comment the more spammy it is, if it gets a huge amount of points, it’s gone, you don’t need to moderate it at all. You can even tweak the plugin so that it “deletes as spam” instead of outright deleting the comments. This will mean that if a good one gets caught accidently, you can restore it
Anything that fails by a small amount gets put in to the moderation queue. Here is the good part though. If more suspicious stuff comes from that IP (which it invariably will. Even though spammers hit from many many IPs, each one generally hits more than once), then it will actually automatically moderate the comment for you and delete it.
Now, for the stats problem. That’s possible to fix as well. Two things you can use, though personally I only use one these days.
Firstly, is referrer karma. This is the sister project to spam karma, and will actually share a database. If a referrer spammer hits your site, they will get a 403 error. The good news is, many comment spammers are also referrer spammers, so this will stop them dead before they even get to leave a comment.
The other option is to customise your .htaccess file. You just manually add in specific phrases from referrer spammers, and anyone with any of those phrases in their referrer string gets bounced back to the page they came from.
My suggestion, look at and install spam karma and referrer karma. If you’re really keen, start playing with .htaccess, but you probably won’t need to
October 2nd, 2005 at 12:15 am
Okay; referrer karma sounds like the greatest thing /ever/. Thankyou so much for that tip; that sounds like just what I need.
Are you still running your blog on WordPress?
October 2nd, 2005 at 1:51 am
Yeah, still running Wordpress. I don’t ever really see myself changing :)
October 2nd, 2005 at 1:52 am
I must say, I’m /really/ impressed with Wordpress 1.5. I haven’t found many really great plugins yet, though.