Blog Spam is WAY out of Control...

[TheDoc]

So I recently upgraded to Wordpress 2.7, the new comment layout lets you see how many comment spams you have, as well as spam pings to your blog.

I flushed it out about this time yesterday, and this morning I have 175 comment and ping spams on one blog.

So I was like, wow 175.. Then I remembered, I easily have 1000's of IP's banned from my comment and contact forms. If I released these IP's huge blocks of comments missed the spam filters and are waiting for my approval.

I have blocked almost the entire asia pacific network, all of name intelligence is blocked, most of FDC and huge amounts of Eastern Euro Ripe network blocks. That doesn't count the massive amounts of everything else from every place else.

This is just nuts now.. blocking this many ip's blocks at a time, then I still use word ban lists, have plugins, and my own shit.. and it's still like this..

I really think I get more comment spam than I do email spam... ugg



Is it like this for others? What do you guys use to keep this under control?


Maybe my comment rule #7 doesn't help
7) I welcome spam Comments/Trackbacks, it helps improve my custom filters.

[DamageX]

Spam Karma?

[boneless]

Spam Karma?

sparma

[Spacedog]

delete the functions that control/allow comments/pingbacks..

[TheDoc]

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[TheDoc]

delete the functions that control/allow comments/pingbacks..

Problem is comments help show page popularity and legit pingbacks are like instant link trades, without them lots of blogs won't talk about you, so you get less good links pointing to you. When you have a kick ass blog like mine, people tend to talk about ya more!

Really good comments on more popular articles also help expand the overall knowledge around the article too, a great bonus for the readers.

Blogs like mine, need to have comments and pingbacks.. But a porn blog running rss feeds for content, doesn't.

[Buzzman]

I ditched Spam Karma and just went with Akismet and let it decide for me. It has been doing a pretty good job moving them out of ones that I need to approve etc.

The next step would be to ban China, Russia and Hong Kong etc via htaccess. It wold cut down on them for sure.

[prima]

Aksimet. Rocks. Fantastic stuff.

[Cherrylula]

If you have enough traffic and the comments are important would it be easier to manage vbulletin maybe? Set it up so the comment link goes to a board thread with the blog post content? I know there are ways to set this up and sites that do that.

Personally I had an issue with a mainstream WP blog that was so frustrating and I had thousands of spam because I was not monitoring it daily, I stripped the entire comments out altogether. But that does sort of defeat the project if you need comments.

[PORKO]

same problem here. takes me a lot of time to check whats spam and whats real in our free hosted blog

[Ashia]

I dont bother anymore.. i just delete everything now or disable comment.
i remember deleting over 1,000 spam manually from an old blog that wasn't upgraded.
ever since then i stopped bloggin with comments.

[Kektex]

I got rid of spam almost completely, at least from automated bots (which is over 95% of spam anyway), using WP Spam Free: WP-SpamFree: A Powerful Anti-Spam Plugin for WordPress! | WebGeek

That plugin and Akismet got rid of spam completely from my blogs.

If you have enough traffic and the comments are important would it be easier to manage vbulletin maybe? Set it up so the comment link goes to a board thread with the blog post content? I know there are ways to set this up and sites that do that.

I would love to know if there's an automated way to do that. I searched around and found nothing.

[kmanrox]

i use akismet, and require all comments to be approved by moderator.. effectively eliminates spam for my blog.

[TheDoc]

I want to 'Stop Spam' totally from my blogs.. I moderate comments, almost all filter into spam. Plugins like Akismet just filter it, but you are still getting spam.

It's been 8 days since this post, I have 844 filtered comment/ping spams. With 1000's of banned IP's address already. I want to stop the spam from happening and reduce the 844+ db connections, 844+ hits, 844+ things making me burn a tiny bit more bw, and so on.. I have no idea how many 1000's this would be without the bans in place I have already.

Freaking spam... I don't get it, doesn't letting bots that run wild posting on blogs that don't instant list anything, be just a waste of bandwidth/resources for the spammer?

They have enough resources to go through different proxies by mad levels, but not enough to know they aren't ever getting listed, traffic, links, credit for it, anything?

Even more so when the same bot, is posting the same bs, to the same site, that moderates everything?

Ugg... That's what I mean with comment spam. Even if you filter it, it's still costing you resources and bandwidth.

[Buzzman]

Lester Chan has a nice plugin to ban ip's easily from the admin panel and there is a plugin to ban emails like .ru. etc. from the admin panel. The ip ban only works on the lastest version of wordpress.

You are right it's still work.

[TheDoc]

Lester Chan has a nice plugin to ban ip's easily from the admin panel and there is a plugin to ban emails like .ru. etc. from the admin panel. The ip ban only works on the lastest version of wordpress.

You are right it's still work.

Nice, looks like Lester Chan has several cool Wordpress Plugins. I will for sure be checking them out. Thanks..

[Kektex]

Really, give WP-Spamfree a shot. It prevents bots from posting by using javascript and some other stuff I can't remember, because bots cannot handle javascript.

WP-SpamFree: A Powerful Anti-Spam Plugin for WordPress! | WebGeek

It completely blocked automated spam from my blogs.

[TheDoc]

Welp, this post turned into an article for me: You can read it below or here: Blog comment and trackback spam - How to stop it!

Blog comment and trackback spam is simply out of control, which I expressed on the Adult Webmaster Forum Ask Damage X and the reason for this article. For me it isn’t about filtering spam, great.. another plugin to do what others do. What I wanted was to stop spam, or as much of it as I could, from happening at all on TheDocBlog. In short, I want to reduce the little bit of bandwidth it costs and any server or mysql resources spam takes up, or as much as possible!

Over the last year I have created my own IP and Host Ban lists blocking 1000’s of IP’s from making comments, as well my my own word spam lists, javascript forms, false-hidden forms, different word and math captchas, renamed my comment post file. With all these goodies in place TheDocBlog still receives at least 75 filtered spams through my blocks. I have tested several different spam filter plugins, but filtering spam really isn’t all that hard, and my end goal is to totally stop the spam from happening.

Based off some of the comments on ADX, I decided to do a quick little test. For 24 hours I would release the IP bans, rename my wp-comments-post.php file back, but keep some other basic setups in place all to track how many total spams I get in a 24 hour period. All comments are moderated so I don’t really care if the filters catch them or not.

Some Quick Testing:
As stated above, TheDocBlog uses a mixture of non-plugin methods to filter spam. I didn’t remove all the little changes, but I did remove all IP and Host blocks from the .htaccess file and replaced the original wp-comments-post.php file. The Javascript form buttons, captchas and everything else stated above is still in place.

• 10:30 am - Sat Dec 27 - IP/Host blocks released, and original comments post file replaced.
• 10:30 am - Sun Dec 28 - Cleared 226 spams and added the Wordpress Plugin, WP-SpamFree which is a spam blocker and not a spam filter!
• In the above 24 hour period TheDocBlog received: 226 spam comments and trackbacks.
• In a single day, this is an increase of 150+ spams, connections, db usage and so on.
  

• 10:30am - Mon Dec 29 - This morning I cleared… ZERO spams! Yep, can’t believe it myself. WP-SpamFree works like a freakin champion. Wow, what a waste of time dealing with other plugins, custom Wordpress changes, and ip bans. WP-SpamFree Rocks the house and a donation from me is on the way!

The Spam is Dead!
Again, what an amazing plugin. I’m a little shocked to be honest. I expected to test several plugins, some of which allow me to ban IP’s & hosts from the wp-admin, others to improve filtering, and so on. As of late last night I removed all hidden forms, removed the math captcha, my own javascript blocks, and replaced the original comment file contents. With all of my own protection methods removed, I still have zero spams, amazing!

Thanks to Kektex on ADX for the advice on trying out WP-SpamFree and thanks to Hybrid6 for creating such a great plugin!



~TheDoc

[Pornonada]

Really, give WP-Spamfree a shot. It prevents bots from posting by using javascript and some other stuff I can't remember, because bots cannot handle javascript.

WP-SpamFree: A Powerful Anti-Spam Plugin for WordPress! | WebGeek

It completely blocked automated spam from my blogs.

as this seem to work good i wonder the following:

- does it also block google and other SE spiders or does it only block posting/spamming attempts?
- Is there a way how this principe can be used on tgp/mgp sites where bots are one of the major problems?

[Kektex]

as this seem to work good i wonder the following:

- does it also block google and other SE spiders or does it only block posting/spamming attempts?
- Is there a way how this principe can be used on tgp/mgp sites where bots are one of the major problems?

I think it only blocks comment spamming attempts. I remember reading somewhere that the way this worked was that it issued some sort of javascript token to the user trying to comment. Since spam bots cannot handle javascript, they don't get the token and cannot comment.
Of course, if a legitimate user tries to comment and doesn't have JS active in the browser, they cannot comment either.

I'm sure a similar solution could work on tgp/mgp sites.