How to keep your WordPress 1.5 Blog Spam Free
Comment Spam, Trackback Spam, Pingback Spam and Referrer Spam are ever increasing problems with blogs.
After moving my blog over to WordPress 1.5, I revisited my Spam prevention strategy. I used CAPTCHA before, which has problems for visually impaired people. Also it requires some effort by the user to fill in the CAPTCHA code. Hence I decided not to use CAPTCHA.
Instead I used a judicious combination of existing solutions. I have tracked the progress for last three months. And the strategy has proven to be highly successful in eliminating spam with almost zero maintenance on my part. If success is defined by the amount of time I spend weekly to keep my blog spam free then I would have to say it is not even 10 minutes per week. Mostly I don't have to do anything.
I will outline the simple steps in this post to make your WordPress 1.5 blog spam free. The same techniques can be applied to other blog systems. However it may require customization.
Here are the plugins you will need for this solution
- WP-HashCash Plugin - Prevents comment spam by robots using Javascript md5 calculations
- Referrer Bouncer Plugin - A Plugin to bounce referrer spammer bots (and humans)
Both of them requires no upfront configuration. Just drop the files in wp-content/plugins folder and activate from the Plugins screen (in administrative interface).
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May 5th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
thanks for the great tip. for some reason I cannot download the hashcash plugin files from that site, it down let me for some reason?
tom
May 5th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
You can use this link (for Hashcash) which will directly download the php file to your computer - http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/wp-hashcash/trunk/wp-hashcash.php?rev=440&format=raw
You will also need to download the js file and place it in the plugins directory - http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/wp-hashcash/trunk/md5.js?rev=88&format=raw
The documentation is at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/wp-hashcash/trunk/wp-hashcash-readme.doc?rev=415&format=raw
May 16th, 2005 at 2:57 am
[...] which doesn’t support captchas yet). A more robust blog-spam solution can be found here i [...]
July 4th, 2005 at 8:45 am
I’ve used WP-HashCash since November 2004 when it was called The Spam Stopgap Extreme. Not one comment spam attempt has gotten past it since I installed it. However, I have placed the plugin on several clients blogs that did cause a user problem. While no spam got through, some aol users could not post comments. For me it’s a non-issue but for one of my clients it was a big issue since a large majority of his users are on aol.
I did find an alternative - Comment Spam Plugin - that works just as well and allows aol users to comment. I still use HashCash and have no intention of changing but for those who may have had a problem with users not being able to post comments, there is a good alternative.
I’ve never tried the Referrer Bouncer Plugin but I don’t get referral spam anymore, nor do any of my clients. I used a simple piece of php code that bounced the referral spam back to the spammers main site. In essence, the referral spammer spammed him/herself! It took a lot of time and effort but it did take care of the problem. I would have loved to have had the plugin but no one thought referral spam was a big enough issue to write a plugin at that time and I do not have the skill to write php code.
I love WP because the community is so willing to share and very active in combating the spam problems on the net today. Thanks for sharing!
July 5th, 2005 at 7:42 am
@glo
> I used a simple piece of php code that bounced the referral spam back to the spammers main site. In essence, the referral spammer spammed him/herself! It took a lot of time and effort but it did take care of the problem.
Referrer Bouncer does the same. The difference is that you don’t have to spend any time or effort to setup or use. It comes pre-configured. In case you want to add your own entries, you can easily do so too.
Thanks for the informative post. I was not aware that Hashcash has issues with AOL users. Have you tried with the latest versions?
July 5th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
The last version I used was 1.7. I don’t know why some aol users had a problem, I just know that when I changed it, the aol users were then able to post comments without a problem. Right now I’m using Bad Behavior on one of my clients blog along with the Comment Spam Plugin. It’s a new blog, well, new to WP, she had one on TypePad for about 8 months before deciding to get her own domain and hiring me to host and design the WP blog. No spam of any kind so far and I expect it to stay that way.
My personal blog is still using WP 1.2. I really need to upgrade it but the design is complicated and I haven’t quite figured out how to incorporate it into a WP theme, though I am getting better at creating designs that are a theme and understanding more about how it works. When I do upgrade I will use the Referrer Bouncer Plugin.
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:21 am
[...] Next I had to go in the code to find out the exact location of the error in wp-comments.php. However before I did that I wanted to remember which plugins hooked into wp-comments. The only one was wp-hashcash, an excellent comment spam prevention plugin. So before going further I disabled the plugin. [...]
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