Blog spam is a real pain in the neck. Tom and I have been swapping notes about this over the last month or so.
I had some initial "success" with the builtin filters, which I then augmented with the SURBL plugin, but that still meant having to manually delete all the junk that was being put in the "moderate" queue.
At Tom's recommendation I've now installed "auth image" which acts a bit like the authentication code you need for submitting a link to Altavista or the one I used to use on search.ie.
The install was quite straight forward, but of course I got lovely errors :)
A bit of googling and a couple of minor changes later it seems to be working fine!
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About this Entry
This page contains a single entry by Michele Neylon published on December 15, 2004 12:27 AM.
Moving mailboxes was the previous entry in this blog.
Quote of the day - Devil’s Advocate is the next entry in this blog.
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I have gone a tad further with this Michele. I have re-named the wp-comments-post.php file, and created a file called which grabs the ip address of people accessing the file directly and writes it to .htaccess denying them future access!
Niall did some digging today and found that most of the spammers share the same user agent, so he's blocking the UA completely :)
Hey Michele, I got hit by spam claiming the auth image plugin I was using was poorly designed and stole code from someone else...[i'm not using the same one you are] so I'm now testing out http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/11/29/spam-stopgap-extreme/ - which uses javascript to prevent screen scraping. I like it simply because having to type the auth image code was annoying people and this does away with that. Seems to be working well anyway.