Fighting Comment Spam

22nd of March, 2006 (Last modified: 21st of March, 2006) Hĺvard WWW , Site specifics , WordPress ,

Comment spam, as mentioned earlier, turned into a real problem for this site. During a day more than 50 spam comments were held back for moderation. Some of them cleverly disguised as real comments asking for help creating a new site, but most of them were just a series of links and drug-related phrases pointing to sites that sell "cheap cialis" and what not.

Tackling the spam wasn't all that difficult, with help from a fellow blogger I've managed to reduce the amount of spam from madness to nothing. The short version of the story is that I've denied access to a range of IP-addresses, this allows me to block out networks that I've received comment spam from.

So far this seems to be working just perfect, in fact, it's working so well that I've published the entire list of blocked IP-addresses in order to help anyone with a similar problem. The list in its entirety can be found at http://hvassing.com/information/fighting-spam/

However, I didn't stop there in my fight against comment spam. The blacklist-feature in WordPress, agressive as it is, was updated to include a whole range of words. Alas, this is likely to purge some comments without even holding them back for moderation, as such this is not an ideal solution. Since I've managed to get rid of the comment spam I will try to ease up my blacklist rules as it might prove too effective and delete comments from my visitors. Time will show how this works out, the .htaccess-rules stays though.

A great thanks to Martin Bekkelund for help and guidance.

2 Responses to “Fighting Comment Spam”

  1. André Eliassen Mar 22nd, 2006 at 12:18

    My standard wordpressfilter is holding back all off my spam for the moment. Luckely i only get like 1-3 of these each day :P

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  2. Magnus Mar 25th, 2006 at 17:05

    I agree with André, my wordpressfilter also blocks off all spam. I’m not to worried about blocking regular posters, though, my posters generally dont use words to promote ways to win money or pills that will help you … ehm. You know :)

    Thanks for the .htaccess list, though, will implement that as well :)

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