Bad behaviour saves the day
For about the past month, I’ve been getting a lot of spam messages posted to my blog. They are all stupid one-line messages that usually include vulgar references to sex in some manner or another. They always post a url, which is always a .info domain, which redirects to winantispyware.com. I think they have an affiliate program with softwareprofit.com or something like that. Either way, they seem to be dirty companies, using a lot of spam, popups and other malicious web tricks. I was receiving up to 30 spam messages a day from this company, which was quite a hassle. The biggest problem was trying to find a way to prevent the messages from getting through.
After repeatedly emailing any address I could find related to both companies and not getting any replies, I decided to see what I could do to block the offending messages. Using the features of WordPress, I was able to flag any spam messages so they wouldn’t be posted on the site. However, that meant I still had to sift through messages, deleting most of them. I thought about blocking ip addresses, but almost all of the messages were from different addresses, so that wouldn’t work. I thought about playing with the WordPress code to introduce a captcha image or something when posting a new comment, but luckily I found a cool plugin that was just the ticket.
Bad behaviour is a set of PHP scripts that prevents spambots from accessing your site. It analyzes HTTP requests and compares them to profiles of known spambots. It’s available as a WordPress plugin, and is also available for a few other CMS, forum and wiki packages. Since installing, I’ve seen the number of spam comments go from 25 or more per day to just 2 in the past week. I highly recommend bad behaviour to help combat spam in your blogs or forums.
Chris says:
Hey Rob, You should upgrade to WordPress 2.0 and make use of their Akismet plugin (http://akismet.com/) it will prevent blog spam with something insane like 99.99% accuracy.It’s a service made by the creator of Wordress..I think to use it you also need an (free) account at wordpress.com to get an API key to use on your own blog. Also, there’s a few things to ensure are setup in Cpanel.. Most importantly, make sure you have the default address set to :bounce: (this will cause made up addresses to bounce) and only legitimate ones to get through. This also means that somethingimadeup@robmaeder.com won’t get through, and you sort of have to standardize on a bunch of addresses to create in the Forwarders section, but its well worth the work. What else.. If you’re not using Thunderbird, or Outlook (not Express) switch to one of those for email – their built-in spam tools are excellent. On top of that, make sure SpamAssassin is enabled on your server and let it tag emails with **SPAM** in the subject.. that should rid you of your spam problem.. mostly.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:24 am
sneaky-ninja says:
I dunno about you but I like Spam…especially fried up, or in an omelette.
Just kidding.
April 3rd, 2006 at 7:22 am