Tag Archives: commentspam

Follow you, follow me

By Dougal | Published: February 15, 2007

Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

The rel="nofollow" idea had good intentions: to give content producers a way to link to another site without implying that they approve of it. [...]

Posted in Blogging, Microformats, Plugins, Search, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged Akismet, Google, Metadata, nofollow, PageRank, plugin, Spam, WordPress, yahoo | 89 Comments

Some blog spam cases you might want to watch for

By Dougal | Published: October 27, 2006

I like to think that I’ve got some pretty decent spam prevention measure in place on my server. My mail server uses RBL/DNSBL services and sets maximum limits for certain protocol violations. All my blogs use Akismet for comment spam detection. I’ve got a large number of entries in my comment moderation and blacklist lists. And I hook it all together into my SpamValve plugin, which automatically adds firewall rules to block repeat offenders.

Still, though, occassionally I get bursts of traffic that either aren’t detected by these measures, or that are detected, but the process of handling the connection causes excessive load on the system. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Software, Spam, Tech, WordPress | Also tagged Akismet, Email, PHP, plugin, Plugins, Spam, SpamValve, this-site, WordPress | 11 Comments

Poisoning the well

By Dougal | Published: December 6, 2005

Overall, the volume of spam attempts on my server have been down lately. Oh, I still get a steady stream, I delete over 100 comment spams (caught by my filters) each day. But I’ve seen fewer of the massive, server-squashing spam runs that hammer my web service with too many simultaneous connections, blocking out legitimate users.

On the other hand, I’m seeing a lot more attempts by spammers to poison the well. What I mean by that is that they are submitting bogus comments, full of non-spammy (but more-or-less random) content, and links to legitimate web sites. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Spam | Also tagged Akismet, Bayesian, dom, Spam | 16 Comments

Googlebomb: Popup Blockers

By Dougal | Published: July 15, 2005

Has your blog been spammed with ads for a Popup Blocker for Internet Explorer?

If you are getting here through a search on Popup Blockers or for Pop-Up Blocker or Pop Up Blocker Internet Explorer, please do not buy from pop-upblocker dot org They are spammers and unethical. [...]

Posted in Blogs, SEO, Search, Spam | Also tagged Google, SEO, Spam | 14 Comments

Spam on the rise again?

By Dougal | Published: June 17, 2005

Has anybody else noticed a sharp increase in blog spam activity lately over the past couple of weeks? The number of firewall rules on my system generated by SpamValve was down below 40 not too long ago, but now it’s back up to over 100 again. The worst of the attacks still cause some brief hiccups on my server from time to time, but now that I’ve got a good set of automated countermeasures in place, I typically don’t notice it until after the fact.

Posted in Blogs, Spam | Also tagged Spam, SpamValve, this-site | 17 Comments

SpamValve update

By Dougal | Published: May 6, 2005

I’ve been pretty busy at work, so I haven’t done much more work on my auto-firewall code in the past couple of days. But it seems to be holding its own pretty well. Normally, over the course of a few days, my comments database accumulates a couple thousand spams (I check it using Chris Davis’ Spam Nuke plugin). But since activating my new system, the spam comments are down to a trickle, maybe 10% of what it used to be.

This is because the system only allows a few attempts from any particular host before it blocks that host completely, eliminating any further attempts. [...]

Posted in Plugins, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged Blog, plugin, Spam, SpamValve, this-site, Web, WordPress | 12 Comments

Testing a new spam blocker

By Dougal | Published: May 3, 2005

I’ve been trying to snatch a few minutes here and there to work on the automated spam blocking system that I proposed last week. Earlier today, I finished up one of the components, and I’m currently testing it. It seems to be performing as designed, so far.

There are three pieces to the system, currently:

ipupdate: A perl script which accepts an IP number as an argument. When run, it checks whether the IP already exists in its configured database table. If not, it adds it. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Servers, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged Perl, plugin, Spam, SpamValve, this-site, Web, WordPress | 6 Comments

Spammers should all DIE DIE DIE

By Dougal | Published: April 27, 2005

I am so sick of the damn spammers. Spammers are teh sux0r. Spammers are a festering boil on the ass of the Internets. I wouldn’t let a spammer kiss my butt with a pair of wax lips from ten feet away. If I ever see a spammer bleeding in a ditch, I will not be a Good Samaritan, I will kick him in the head, cover him up with dirt, and leave him there to rot.

Over the past few weeks, the comment spam has been coming in so thick that I’ve had to start blocking IPs at the firewall level. I’m currently blocking over 40 IPs, plus an entire Class C block out of Mexico. My normal blacklist blocks prevent the spam from showing up on the blog anyhow, but they were coming in so fast and furious that Apache and MySQL were grinding to a halt under the load.

On top of that, the email spam has been spiking up, too. [...]

Posted in Blogs, Servers, Spam | Also tagged Email, Spam, SpamValve, this-site | 47 Comments

Blacklist Peering Plugin

By Dougal | Published: February 24, 2005

Mark over at WeblogToolsCollection has come up with another great WordPress plugin for combatting blog comment spam: Blacklist Peering Plugin. My existing greylist and my growing blacklist are doing a pretty good job of keeping the junk out of sight so far. I’m looking forward to adding this plugin to my arsenal. Together, we can tighten the noose even more.

Posted in Blogs, Plugins, Software, Spam, WordPress | Also tagged plugin, Spam, Web, WordPress | 4 Comments

Meme Roundup

By Dougal | Published: January 21, 2005

There have been several new memes lately that I have thoughts on, but I just haven’t had the time to comment on them here. I still don’t have time to discuss them in as much depth as I’d like, but here’s a quick summary:

RSS 1.1:
I have mixed feelings on this. It fixes one of my biggest complaints about RSS 1.0, which was the requirement for the rdf:Seq list, which seemed redundant with the content elements. [...]