No Spam
As a Wordpress lover, I also fight my share of Spam. When I was able to drop my daily comment spam rate from over 400 comment spam a day to less than 30 a day, I was ecstatic!
Although Akismet does its job by seperating the Spam Comments from the Non Spam comments, I still had to go through and make sure that the ones caught truely are spam.
Using Akismet and a few other great tools, not only am I able to cut tons of comment spam out, I am also helping out to catch spammers.
No, I am not trying to sell you anything, I just want to pass on how I was able to do this.
Since late 2005, I have been a member of Project Honeypot. It is a great way to set up a honeypot to attract spammers. The best part is, all of the spammers caught there are documented.
Recently, Stuart Ryan released a Wordpress plugin that takes advantage of this wonderful resource and makes it easy to combine into Wordpress.
By combining Stuart Ryan’s WP-HoneyPot, the reporting capabilities and services of Project Honeypot and the WP-Ban Plugin from Lester Chan, I was able to drastically drop my spam rate from over 400 Comment Spam a day to under 30 a day. Talk about a major improvement!
To make things easier, I took the ip addresses that Akismet caught, the top 50 Comment Spam IP Addresses from Project Honeypot’s list of US and All Time Comment Spammers, and then combined them into a BAN IP address list from WP-Ban Plugin . The WP-Ban Plugin also lets me set a message for banned IP address in case someone who is not a spammer cannot access the website:
You Are Banned.
Please note: being banned from this site does not necessarily mean the IP address is owned by a spammer. For example, it may have been hijacked from its true owner, or it could be in a DHCP IP Pool where someone before you has spammed. If you believe an IP address is listed here in error, contact me and I will investigate.
This way, if a person is wrongfully banned from the site using the WP-Ban Plugin, I can unban them if I investigate it and determine the user is not a spammer.
I keep a running list of bannded IP addresses that I just copy and paste into the WP-Ban Plugin area for ip addresses on each site I use. Then I set up the WP-HoneyPot plugin and add my domain to Project Honeypot.
All of these resources together have helped me reduce my spam count and I also enjoy knowing that I am actively helping fight spam!
I’ve started using the AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin which links into the Project Honeypot database and also the stopforumspam dot com database. Seems to be working quite well.
Sarah´s last blog ..Walk coast
Ya, I agree few times right comments are also deleted due to wrong way of writing the comment or using Url which is considered spam.
Wedding Guru´s last blog ..Best Wedding Dresses 2009 – The Latest Trends
Spam is a big problem, for example, I have to my blog every day to remove a lot of spam comments!
Hi. This is definitely very helpful info you have here and I appreciate the post.
what I really don’t like is robots made comments that post on blogs something like nice post and a bunch of backlinks that kind of spam i really hate. Sometimes users post relevant comments but the name or website they use marks them as spammers, I always review this cases and correct them if necesary
Yes, spam is certainly a huge problem now, every day I get several spam emails, which offer me to buy something very cheap and once it becomes clear that this is a lie.
Project Honeypot is something I will look into. Earlier tonight I was manually adding IP addresses from my spam list into .htaccess (only 10 ranges this time!) so direct access to spam IP addresses would be useful so I can ban them before they arrive at my site!
Paul’s last blog post..Kent coast
I am using akisment as of now.
Will try wp ban plugin to and let all of you know about the results.
Stay tuned !!
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Thanks for giving us such a great information which gave us help to protect our site from spams.
I have akismet installed, and I also use bad behavior and log in lock down. I know those help prevent hacking, but I also believe it has cut down on the bots that try to fill your site up with spam.
The only problem I see with Akismet, is sometimes, good people get wrongly flagged, and you gotta dig them out!
Installing Akismet has been a big timesaver for me as I have several blogs. Will try the other ones asap.
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Nice post. Thank you for the info. Keep it up.
This Blog reminds me the reason I like bloging so much, the interaction is very important with readers and you guys have it right. Looks great too, will be back for more posts, David the mover.
Ah, it’s good to know people are fighting spam.
Still, I feel that isn’t enough not a lot are doing much about it. The spammers will probably find ways to overcomes these, but again that’s why people are also creating new way to fight spam.
It’s a never ending battle for justice!
Fight the spam, not the blog!