Comments on: Comment spam plugins no longer required!

By: Newschick

Newschick — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:11:17 +0000

Have you had any issue with WP blocking comments that were not spam? Or not allowing moderation of comments that it deemed “bad”? My account is showing a huge number of so called spam and I don’t believe that all of the comments are spam, but it will not allow me to check them.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:25:19 +0000

With my WP blogs that got spam a lot I installed bad behaviour plugin and suddenly I’m not getting anywhere near the levels of spame I was getting.

By: Mayors

Mayors — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:47:19 +0000

Captcha is shit.
Readers don’t post comments if you have captcha

By: Major increase in Spam Comments | Stephen’s Thoughts

Major increase in Spam Comments | Stephen’s Thoughts — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 12:00:57 +0000

[...] I think I am going to have to implement some of the measures that Tom Raferty used to eliminate spam comments from his website. Seeing as most of the comments are about on line gambling of some sort. I am going to try the blacklist option for the moment and see how that goes. Bookmark at these sites:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

By: Mike's Blog Â» The New PR Update Has Just Begun

Mike's Blog Â» The New PR Update Has Just Begun — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:42:30 +0000

Trackbacking your entry……

[...]See other threads about the update on DigitalPoint and SEOchat. … whatÂ’s your new pagerank? [...]…

By: village-idiot.org » I am not alone!

village-idiot.org » I am not alone! — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 04:31:30 +0000

[...] Somehow or another I missed a post on a blog that I actually read regarding spam and WordPress. Tom has decided to forgo the use of plugins and opted instead to rely mainly on an .htaccess. His .htaccess utilizes the same pinapple proxy blocking, same domain blocking, and so on. Slightly different implentation - same effect. [...]

By: Don’t Quibble with Quimble » Blog Archive » Spam, spam, spam

Don’t Quibble with Quimble » Blog Archive » Spam, spam, spam — Sat, 20 May 2006 15:59:58 +0000

[...] On my blog I took these steps. It seems to be working decently. [...]

By: Rants, Inc. » Blog Archive » Die, Spam, Die!!!

Rants, Inc. » Blog Archive » Die, Spam, Die!!! — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 03:21:23 +0000

[...] I have found this neat-o information about blocking spam in WordPress.Â I did everything stated there except for the .htaccess thing because i’m too lazy.Â Hopefully this will be enough… [...]

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:54:40 +0000

Another point Cero - your blog doesn’t allow comments so I can’t give you feedback there - blogs without comments and CAPTCHAs - not my kind of company.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:13:19 +0000

Cero,

CAPTCHA’s are a very poor way of dealing with spam - the American Foundation for the blind has written many times about how difficult Captchas make browsing for blind or partially sighted people and the W3C in a report on Captchaâ€™s said:

A common method of limiting access to services made available over the Web is visual verification of a bitmapped image. This presents a major problem to users who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability such as dyslexia.

By: Cero Spam

Cero Spam — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:16:07 +0000

Hi,
we are testing a new free form-protection service (www.cerospam.com.ar), for blogs and for any kind of web site. It is easy to setup each form with this system, and it is very useful for protecting comment forms from spammers.
It is based on captcha method. Until now it seems to work fine. No matter what kind of blog software you are using, this is not a plugin.
Please, test it and do not hesitate to send us your comments!
Thank you.

By: blob » My first comment spam

blob » My first comment spam — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 23:45:34 +0000

[...] WP codex Combatting Spam WP codex Spam Words Usefull blog post by Tom Raftery WP Hashcash plugin My Spam Words list Screen shot of my checked options in WP [...]

By: Captcha’s are lame « Tom Raftery’s I.T. views

Captcha’s are lame « Tom Raftery’s I.T. views — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 16:11:26 +0000

[...] There are many good anti-comment spam tools and procedures available, don’t use captchas. blogging business blogging captcha comment spam Comment Spamblogging business blogging captcha comment spam Comment Spam [...]

By: Tom Raftery’s I.T. views » Blog Archive » Comment spam run last night

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 08:05:12 +0000

[...] The site was hit by over 80 spams overnight - the first spam run to make it through my anti spam defences in over a year. [...]

By: effisk

effisk — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 10:26:41 +0000

we have an interesting sample of spam just above this message.
Looks like what you did’s note quite enough…

By: Alice Kelly

Alice Kelly — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 16:02:33 +0000

There are many men descussed in blog.Why? I think men must to work.

By: Jalansutera

Jalansutera — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 02:22:47 +0000

Thanks for your nice tips. I followed you and it is true. WP is powerful.

By: IO ERROR

IO ERROR — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:35:51 +0000

In an ideal world, spammers could be shot on sight. This would make it more difficult (or dangerous, rather) to send spam, but I doubt the authorities will go for it.

Oh well.

I had a serious problem with comment spam. I was getting hundreds or even thousands of them daily. I used to run Spam Karma, Spam Karma 2, Spaminator, Spam this, Spam that, you name it. I had problems with them all. Mostly false positives, though on occasion my site would be completely unavailable. So I wrote my own anti-spam plugin, wp-spamassassin (if you REALLY want it, search for it). That was five months ago. I don’t use it anymore.

Every approach to combating spam has its advantages and disadvantages. So I wrote something else, not to combat spam, but to combat the spammers’ software. Thus Bad Behavior was born.

I take a completely different approach. I don’t screen comment/trackback content at all. Instead, I screen the user agents themselves. This is similar to .htaccess rules, but FAR more sophisticated. I can analyze far more about the user agent from PHP than from .htaccess, so I have been able to eliminate false positives and block out virtually every spambot out there. Out of over 40,000 attempts at my site, exactly eight have gotten as far as the moderation queue. Not too bad for a plugin that doesn’t even look at the comments. (And I’ve since fixed that.)

This is very important; it’s quite easy to block legitimate users using .htaccess. For instance, this person inadvertently blocked out many people using Internet Explorer. You have to go deeper than User-Agent and Referer in order to distinguish accurately between the spambots and the people.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:36:25 +0000

mp3seeker,

Couldn’t agree more - I had Spam Karma on my site very briefly but I found it gave too many false positives so I uninstalled it.

I haven’t had any anti-comment spam plugins on this site since I wrote this article and I haven’t had any problems with comment spam either.

Hope this helps,

Tom

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:33:46 +0000

I wish I had the time to edit .htaccess files and blacklist tables to make sure I don’t see comment spam too. However, I am very pleased that Spam Karma does this for me and an increadible job of it at that. Out of over 3400 comment spams in 3 months, I have only had *1* false positive and a couple of false negitives.

If using WP’s built in precautions work for you, wonderful. For me, I need an automated way of dealing with them.