strange spam-ish comments (anonymous, not valid email)

jagadishwaran
(@jagadishwaran)

19 years ago

I’ve recently installed WordPress 1.5 and all is going well with controlling SPAM other than I seem to be getting a few each day that have an empty name field and an emailfield that just contains the letter “e”.

This is happening despite me requiring users to provide a name and email address. The text of the comment itself is completely empty.

I always mark it as spam, just wanted to find out how this gets there — is there no server-side check for name and valid email? Can’t see how it can submit an anonymous comment with an invalid emailaddress and no comments.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

trevorturk
(@trevorturk)

19 years ago

the best thing to do is set the comman spam keywords. there is a link in there to the codex, which has a long list of them. copy and paste that, and you’ll see a lot less spam.

Thread Starter jagadishwaran
(@jagadishwaran)

19 years ago

Sure, thanks for that — I can probably prevent that spam from coming through but would like to find out how it can be submitted as anonymous, an invalid email and no comment text.

Also since the only thing the comment contains is the letter “e” in the email field I can’t simply blacklist it :\

hasaki
(@hasaki)

18 years, 12 months ago

I’ve been getting a bunch of them too, and its been happening since I upgraded to 1.5 from one of the nightlies released before that.

My word blacklist is fine, as far as I can tell – 70 comments waiting for me to mark as spam for today. Regular comments are working fine though.

Moderator James Huff
(@macmanx)

Volunteer Moderator

18 years, 12 months ago

Jagadishwaran, you may want to look into other anti-spam plugins like Spam Karma or Bad Behavior.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam

angsuman
(@angsuman)

18 years, 11 months ago

Actually I have seen such comments as precursors to large deluge of spam. Apparently they use it to test the field!

Since upgrading my blog to WP 1.5, I have upgraded my spam prevention strategy and they have been extremely successful for the last three months. No spam and near-zero maintenance. It doesn’t use Spam Karma which is notorious for giving users a hard time.

Let me know if you find it useful.

Mark (podz)
(@podz)

18 years, 11 months ago

In fairness ….. I use Spam Karma 2 (I’m running 1.5.1) and SK2 has killed thousands of comment and trackback spams, and it has not made a mistake.

SK2 ?
Bloody marvellous !

skippy
(@skippy)

18 years, 11 months ago

There have been bugs with WordPress whereby spammers could post data directly to the comments (as comments or trackbacks). Most of these should be fixed by now.

As for why these are happening: WordPress 1.5 supports an “emergent registration” system, whereby a comment can get auto-approved if any comment exists in the system from the same email address as was supplied in the submission. This means that Joe Blogger’s first comment on your site requires manual moderation from you, but subsequent comments from him will be auto-matically approved.
The theory is: slip some innocous junk into the blog, and then blast them later with a deluge of spam which will hopefully get automatically approved.