Attack of the Evil Spammers
Posted by Stropp on January 9, 2009I just checked the blog comments, and lo there appeared before me well over 200 spam comments from the same dirtbag.
I use Akismet which is usually pretty good at catching this type of spam. Over the last two and a bit years, Akismet has stopped 56,692 bits of trash from littering the site. Minus the last coupla hundred.
So I went through and spent a little time marking up the spam and telling Akismet about it. Akismet, as I understand it, is trainable and if a bad comment gets through, Akismet will learn from it making it less likely to reoccur.
What is probably attractive to the spammers is that the comment links in this blog (which is pagerank 4) are do follow, which means that they provide link juice to the sites that this one links. This in turn helps the spammer site do better for the search terms they are trying to rank, which leads to more web traffic.
Personally, I'd like to keep the blog as do follow. I think that a legitimate commentor who wants to link back to his own site deserves the benefit of a do follow link simply as thanks for the comment. Spammer's will never get that benefit though, because I use a Wordpress plugin that keeps the no-follow link on a comment for a few days. This gives me a chance to delete any spam before it gets that much sought after link juice.
So the scumbag who flooded my blog with spam today ain't getting nuthin'. Even if Google crawled my blog today while the links were there, it would have ignored the no-follow spammy links.
Now if Akismet could only string these spammers up by the genitals and spin them around slowly, my day would be complete.
Stropp! How are ya?
Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam — and eggs!
Try the Yawasp wordpress plugin, it gets rid of like 99% of spam comments. It won’t stop those which are submitted manually (like this one, ha!), but will block every comment submitted by automated bots. Basically if I remember correctly, it changes some value in the comments form every 24 hours or so and adds one (invisible) field which bots fill in but normal users don’t.
Hey Stropp – what ya been playing?
[...] about WordPress Plugins as of January 9, 2009 Attack of the Evil Spammers – stroppsworld.com 01/09/2009 I just checked the blog comments, and lo there appeared before me [...]
@Ysharros — I’m doing well. How about you? I prefer spam spam spam spam, eggs, and spam.
@Warleveling — thanks for the tip. I’ll have a look see. However, since my little rampage against blog spam, the amounts have quietened once again.
@DM Osbon — I’ve been playing lots. Check out my new post: http://stroppsworld.com/2009/01/11/twas-the-season-to-be-gaming/ for the details.
Rather than waiting for Akismet to learn, you can also ban immediately by IP with http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ban/
Hi John. Usually by the time I get to the comments, it’s too late and the spammer has done the dirty deed. That would reduce some reoffending though, but I’m not sure how much since they usually use botnets that work from all over. Worth a look though.
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