Surprisingly little spam on WP

  • youngmicroserf

    (@youngmicroserf)


    17 years ago

    Hi, in March, a couple of Server Meltdowns due to comment spam forced us to take a bigger blog installation from MT to WP. We’re talking about Comment spam in the magnitude of a couple of thousand comments a day. And now? The System is up and running on WP for two weeks, and there’s only been 93 Akismet identified spam comments so far. I find this stunning, and I don’t really have any explanation. The URL is the same, but, of course, the comment script’s URL has changed.

    So I’m assuming we’re simply getting a little break until the spam bots have realised what to do. But that does apparently take longer than expected. So maybe dynamically, randomly renaming the comments scripts from within WP would be a useful way to protect from spambots.

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  • Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    WordPress.org Admin

    17 years ago

    No. Spambots don’t usually use the comment forms. They use trackbacks, mostly.

    Obfuscating your comments and such is not a solution. They could simply load the page first and parse the form to get the correct place to send it, so that doesn’t much help, except to double your traffic load.

    The best way to block spam is to use Bad Behavior to block the more obvious spambots, and then to use Akismet to catch the spam that does make it through.

    Thread Starter youngmicroserf

    (@youngmicroserf)

    17 years ago

    fair enough, but we still get tons of hits on the old mt_comments.cgi file. To allow legitimate commenters, all are 301ed to the wp-permalink, but the spam bots still aren’t getting it. We’ve used a turing test for submission before and the math-comment protectionnow on WP. On my other blog – also on WP, but no math comment spam protection – i have about 1/100 of the traffic but still get about 20 Akismet spam comments per day. So maybe they are using the form? Or could this indicate a problem with the trackback system?

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