Archive for the 'Comment Spam' Category

Comments fixed! - AuthImage 2.0.4 breaks AuthImage addressing.

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 21/1/2005
in Comment Spam and Technology
. 4 Comments

Well, it serves me right. After crowing about how good AuthImage is to everyone, I forgot to check it after getting my hosting company to “rebuild php with the required modules“. It was still broken on this site, meaning no-one could comment!

This time, when I accessed the authimage.php file directly asking for an image (i.e. authimage.php?type=image), I was served up the image, no problem. So I knew, now that the error was elsewhere. A quick trawl of my log files showed a lot of 404’s for /wordpress/wordpress/…/authimage.php - the duplication of the wordpress folders was incorrect so now I knew there was an error in addressing the image.

Addressing takes place in the wp-comments.php file so I corrected the error there.

Interestingly this was the reverse of an error I had corrected previously. It seems that my upgrade to Authimage 2.0.4 ‘fixed’ this error, causing my earlier correction to fail!

All’s well now anyway, so comment away mad!

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Google acts to halt comment spam

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/1/2005
in Blogging, Comment Spam and Search Engines
. 1 Comment

Google have announced a new tag that should remove the motive for content spamming.

From now on, when Google MSN, and Yahoo! see the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, they will now no longer index any such links.

Keith McDuffee - the author of the very excellent AuthImage - a Captcha comment spam blocking WordPress plugin has published code to implement the new nofollow tag in WordPress.

Be aware that there is a typo in the published code - I have commented on Keith’s site to make him aware of this but just in case you miss that, remove the space in the first line before the ?PHP if one exists - if there is no space there, Keith has probably fixed it.

This nofollow tag won’t be a quick solution to this problem, as it won’t be implemented in all blogs for quite some time, so the incentive to spam will still exist. Spammers are not going to go the trouble of trying to see which blogs have implemented this, so don’t expect a dramatic fall off in the amount of spam in the next couple of days or even weeks!

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AuthImage error - Call to undefined function: imagettftext()

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 20/1/2005
in Blogging, Comment Spam and Open Source
. 0 Comments

I was using AuthImage - Keith McDuffee’s fantastic WordPress plugin to prevent comment spam. I wrote about the process which led me to install this plugin last year.

Recently however, I realised that there was a problem with the plugin - it wasn’t displaying the code for commenters to enter, so no-one was able to make comments on any of the posts in this blog.

To find the error, I accessed the authimage.php file directly asking for an image (i.e. authimage.php?type=image) I received the error “Call to undefined function: imagettftext()”.

A quick Google on this error led me to a page which explained that “Those errors indicate that your PHP installation does not have True Type Font support compiled”.

I contacted my hosting company explaining the problem, and they responded quickly with a mail saying “I’ve rebuilt php with the required modules. All should be fixed” and indeed, AuthImage is now functioning as expected again.

Interestingly, I disabled the AuthImage plugin when I spotted the problem, and in the few short hours that it was disabled, I received a load of comment spam. This was the first comment spam I had received since I had installed AuthImage. Just goes to show how effective this plugin has been in stopping this plague annoying me!

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AuthImage not displaying image

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/12/2004
in Blogging and Comment Spam
. 0 Comments

The initial AuthImage install didn’t go according to plan. When the plug-in was installed, no image appeared - therefore no comments could be left, genuine or otherwise.

After scratching my head for some time, I remembered that this blog is in a separate folder from my Wordpress installation. I checked back over the AuthImage code and sure enough, there was a line in my comments.php file:
“img src=”/wp-content/plugins/authimage.php”

When I changed it to:
“img src=”/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/authimage.php”

The image appeared, the code worked perfectly and comments can no longer be submitted without entering the randomly generated code.

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Stopping Wordpress blog comment spam - the conclusion!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/12/2004
in Blogging and Comment Spam
. 1 Comment

Renaming the wp-comments-post.php file had a drastic effect on the comment spam - it appears very many blog comment spammers go directly to this file to submit their spam.

After changing the name of this file, not only did the amount of spam fall off significantly but the number of 404’s for this file ballooned - mostly from ip addresses in Brazil or Bulgaria.

Still one or two were getting through. On the offchance that this would increase again, I installed Gudfly’s Authimage. This is a Wordpress plug-in which displays an image with some random text that the commenter has to enter in order for their comment to be submitted successfully.

I installed that plug-in this morning and with help on the design side from FrankP, I re-designed the comments page accordingly.

I am now looking forward to significantly reduced comment spam.

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Wordpress comment spam yet again

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 9/12/2004
in Blogging and Comment Spam
. 2 Comments

Unbelieveably, I am still getting comment spam through the various measures I have put in place.

Just this evening, I have re-named the wp-comments-post.php file - previously I had edited the contents of this file, changing comment variable names but this hasn’t deterred all the comment spammers!

Hopefully, renaming the file will further reduce the amount of comment spam this site is seeing.

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