Hot answers tagged spam
14
For my blog, I too run Akismet to catch any spam that is posted to my blog, but I also prevent spam from being posted in the first place using a few plugins:
Cookies For Comments requires that people leaving comments have cookies and CSS stylesheets enabled. A stylesheet is added to your site that when loaded sets a cookie. This cookie is then looked for ...
9
On the Akismet side, a few things to note. First, in wp-admin under 'Plugins -> Akismet Configuration' is everything green? You mentioned that you confirmed the API key is correct. Did you check the 'Server Connectivity' section? All of the IP addresses listed should be green. If not then you server isn't able to make the needed requests to akismet.com ...
7
Create a file in wp-content/plugins/ with this code:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Get Rid of Comment Websites
*/
function my_custom_comment_fields( $fields ){
if(isset($fields['url']))
unset($fields['url']);
return $fields;
}
add_filter( 'comment_form_default_fields', 'my_custom_comment_fields' );
Normally, I'd say put it into your theme's ...
6
Its most likely to be a TrackBack or pingback:
In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed
to provide a method of notification
between websites: it is a method of
person A saying to person B, "This is
something you may be interested in."
To do that, person A sends a TrackBack
ping to person B.
5
WP-reCAPTCHA should stop machine
entered spam
Sorry Jeff, there are any number of nefarious sites out there that provide easy programatic API's for breaking CAPTCHA's. Sadly, a lot of these are done by people in real time, but to a bot that is just an implementation detail.
Here is one: http://www.kourkouta.com/service.php
A while back I wrote an ...
5
The incoming links widget is asking Google for links to the domain you’re on right now. If your domain is localhost you get a lot of links – because that’s a very common domain name. Unfortunately, some people don’t clean up their data when they move from localhost to the world wide web, and then Google will find these links. :)
Nothing to worry about.
4
How can I tell WP to trash all comments that come from a certain username?
Settings > Discussion > Comment Blacklist - any words there will auto-spam comment, it matches against name and other comment's fields.
What do you generally do in situations like this?
I use my own spam filter that I am confident is extremely unlikely to produce false ...
4
I think the amount of people doing data entry commenting (see hundreds of jobs out there...: http://www.freelancer.com/projects/by-job/Forum-Posting.html ) will defeat the purpose here of a spam checker. They are used on many different workplaces and each time "new jobs" are offered to other people.
I think it is best to in the first place remove the ...
4
I haven't done this personally, but it would be pretty easy. If you are building your comment form manually, just before the end of the </form> put:
<?php wp_nonce_field( 'comment_nonce' ) ?>
Then, just hook into the pre_comment_on_post action which fires when you submit a comment:
add_action( 'pre_comment_on_post', 'my_verify_comment_nonce' ...
4
I am a HUGE fan of the Bad Behavior plugin:
Bad Behavior complements other link
spam solutions by acting as a
gatekeeper, preventing spammers from
ever delivering their junk, and in
many cases, from ever reading your
site in the first place. This keeps
your site's load down, makes your site
logs cleaner, and can help prevent
denial of ...
4
Use Antispam Bee. It is free, doesn’t phone home, and it works surprisingly well as long as you dont change the comment form too much (you have to test it).
Just make sure you disable the mail notification for spam comments. :)
3
You actually want to keep these comments marked as spam--not trashed. Akismet checks against your spam list while deciding what to do with a new comment. So having a large database of spam comments actually helps Akismet work.
I get what your issue is, but what you're essentially asking for is a spam filter for your spam filter.
If you're having trouble ...
3
In short most spammers, or really 100% of spammers, are automated bots that are generally poorly written and cheap. Most spammers use a handful of these 'bots' in terms of market share, so it makes them very easy to identify. If you create a custom bot your chances of being caught with bbq decrease greatly.
The details can be read here ...
3
I have been using Recaptcha which has the added benefit of helping to translate literature. (!)The plugin linked above will add Re-Captcha to your comments or registration form or both. It also has features like themes for the captcha forms. Definitely worth looking into.
3
Most of the spam I get is via the contact form, always using a gmail address. I take the time to report every single one of them to Google. I figure since they are trying to use that gmail address then the sooner I help get it taken down, the less ROI they will get on that method and they will simply stop trying.
Akismet has been very good at filtering out ...
3
The reason spammers are creating accounts most of the time is so they can comment regularly on your blog to gain a link to which ever site they are trying to promote. Also they are checking to see if you "allow new user registrations" which opens up a door of exploits they can try in order to inject SQL into your site to add backlinks without your knowledge.
...
3
I would generally not recommend modifying files for Plugins that you do not control. Better would be to write your own site/custom Plugin, to control this hook:
add_action('akismet_scheduled_delete', 'akismet_delete_old');
First, to stop the deletion altogether, simply call:
remove_action('akismet_scheduled_delete', 'akismet_delete_old');
Then, you can ...
3
Of course this is possible it would just require some custom coding. This is an open ended question so I'll give you an open ended answer of how I may go about this.
Add phone number field to user contact
Use the profile_update hook to store a random code associated with that number
Create a verify phone number page
Use Twilio or Tropo to send the user ...
3
They were probably automatically created by spam bots. You can disable user registration by going to the Settings > General page and unchecking the Anyone Can Register box. You'll still be able to manually create users, but users won't be able to register themselves automatically.
If you want to allow users to register, but still avoid spam bots, you can ...
3
If you are using a twentyten/eleven theme, they hardcode the pingback meta tag into the head.php file. Remove that line or use your own theme. Also, and maybe it's only in multisite, but the X-Pingback header is sent along with the xmlrpc endpoint url as well. Removed with the following:
/**
* Remove the X-Pingback header, since pingbacks are disabled
*/
...
2
I have been using WP-SpamFree for years and have been happy:
WP-SpamFree
If you want to quick check the effectiveness, you try out on my site.
2
To actually reduce spam, I'd suggest installing a Captcha plug-in. Really, though, if the spam is being caught by Akismet already, there's not much of a need to add another filter. It just adds an 'are you human?' verification step before double checking by passing the actual comment through Akismet.
Using both systems in concert will block most automated ...
2
In vanilla WordPress the only difference is that trashed comments get deleted automatically after (customizable) time span.
Adding plugins to the picture - it might make difference to what/how specific plugin learns from incoming spam.
2
@janoChen,
The problem could be that your email server is not using Domain Keys or a valid spf record
DomainKeys is an e-mail authentication system that allows for incoming mail to be checked against the server it was sent from to verify that the mail has not been modified. This ensures that messages are actually coming from the listed sender and allows ...
2
"...spam entered by human beings will still get through -- and there are more and more human being spam farms, it is true..."
This is the price of success.
There are indeed "farms" out there, esp. in third-world countries, that hire folks for pennies per hour to copy/paste/post comments and links in popular blogs.
Unfortunately your best option to ...
2
What exactly are you hoping for as an answer beyond what's written in the docs?
Read the plugin's source code: it uses, as the docs explain, http headers, IP, and meta stuff, and dumps things that are incomplete, inconsistent, or otherwise don't look right. There's positively nothing to add without giving you a line by line commentary of the source code -- ...
2
Yes.
The easiest way would be to include a Captcha on your registration page. Most Captcha systems depend on the user's ability to read a word or answer a question (i.e. "What is 2+3?"). Automated systems like these spam bots have trouble with Captchas, but they're by no means perfect.
However, I discovered today a Captcha plug-in that protects the ...
2
I would recommend Block Spam By Math Reloaded for the following reasons.
There is no registration to a third party site (which always worries me because if they pull the service you could be left with broken forms).
It has a decent score on the Wordpress site, I find the community scores to be generally quite good at highlighting good/bad plugins.
...
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