New Plugin: WP-Spamhaus

whooami
(@whooami)

17 years, 1 month ago

WP-Spamhaus is a plugin I put together a few months ago to take care of what I call, “the spammer got in the door” syndrome.

It checks EVERY IP that hits nearly every page of your WordPress blog to three lists:

1. a local whitelist
2. a local blacklist
3. the database of IPs maintained by spamhaus.org

An IP that match an IP in the whitelist are allowed access.

An IP that matches an IP listed in the local blacklist is unceremoniously banned.

An IP that matches a an IP listed at spamhaus.org is also banned however (assuming you take care of this) the user is provided a way to contact you via e-mail to to request whitelisting, AND they are told that their current IP is listed at spamhaus. You will also receive an e-mail notifying you that someone has been banned, along with the IP, so that you can investigate it further.

I’ve no problems with the current “recommended” WordPress plugins that battle spam, except that they work after the fact —

The spammer still gets to spam you. And they still get to suck up your bandwidth.

WP-Spamhaus will stop nearly all of that.

Details and downloads are here:

http://www.village-idiot.org/archives/2007/03/01/wp-spamhaus/

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

Chris_K
(@handysolo)

17 years, 1 month ago

Very interesting. Based on the description, one would look at this instead of BB?

Seems pretty cool.

Do you (personally) end up with a large white or black list?

spencerp
(@spencerp)

17 years, 1 month ago

Isn’t this the one I’ve been using for a few many months now, whoo? 🙂 I love this plugin! Should I just download this one, and remove the “ProxyStopper” one now, or..?

Thread Starter whooami
(@whooami)

17 years, 1 month ago

yeah spence, it is, just cleaned up a whooole lot and now you have the whitelist and the blacklist available. if i were you, I would kill what I sent you, and use this.

handy, well that all depends 🙂 BB does alot more..more wasnt what I was personally looking for though. my blacklist is pretty large, yeap, 12k most of em proxies too 🙂

I detest proxies.

vkaryl
(@vkaryl)

17 years, 1 month ago

Cool! Thanks, m’friend…. I think I’ll leave BB and SK2 where they’re at for right now, until I see what I can get by without if either of them….

Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)
(@otto42)

WordPress.org Admin

17 years, 1 month ago

Bad Behavior’s check is a bit more complicated, obviously.

I notice that this is checking spamhaus’s sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org server. Shouldn’t this be using zen.spamhaus.org instead? See here: http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/

Thread Starter whooami
(@whooami)

17 years, 1 month ago

hmmm, Ill give that a shot, and see how that works out, thanks otto!

thats going to return A LOT of positives, hell it even blocks me (comcast email)

Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)
(@otto42)

WordPress.org Admin

17 years, 1 month ago

Well, by using zen, you can check the returned address to tell whether it’s in the sbl, xbl, or pbl. PBL ones are okay, basically. So your plugin just has to check the return address like is given on the page above.

Spamhaus may stop offering the non-combined ones at some point, so switching to zen would probably be a good future move.

Thread Starter whooami
(@whooami)

17 years, 1 month ago

I’ve adjusted the code so that I’m using zen, but allowing IPs listed in the PBL access. It seems a smidge faster also which is nice – I have to admit I was seeing a page load issue using the other, (I did narrow it down to the dns lookup) and this seems somewhat better (4-6 seconds faster).

webdressing
(@webdressing)

17 years, 1 month ago

This looks great Whooami, plus your dog is cool 🙂 Is it a West Highland?

Thread Starter whooami
(@whooami)

17 years, 1 month ago

thanks, and yes she is 🙂