trackback spam

Um, I installed my buddy Jonas’ little graphics thing to fend off spammers. It has reduced comment spam, but trackback spam I get a lot. I do not display any trackbacks on the site, though, I just get a bucket of email every day.

Can someone with a ton of trackback spam over the last week or two forward me along the useful information? It would be MUCH appreciated, and help a lot of people here in the end…

Basically, a dump of the IP addr, user url, and any url in the comment, would do pretty well. if you have a HUGE amount of trackback spam in your comment table, AND not much real comments, I’m happy to take an SQL dump of the comment table as a simple method to get me data…

I’m working to improve CG-AntiSpam (which is in alpha testing in the new CG-PowerPack 1.5 release) to do a decent job on trackback/pingback spam, and looking to see what people are getting as I haven’t gotten any yet (but my ‘live’ codebase is 1.0-era).

Also, I’ve found renaming the wp-comments-post/popup files in 1.0 to have shut off a lot of spam by itself, as the spammers try to just hit those files to post data to your site. I’ll have to look at 1.5’s file layout to see what the equivalent is.

You can get to me at ‘cgcode’ at my website.

-d

I’d have to see the comments table, and figure out why legit comments got marked as spam — they really shouldn’t have been. Luckily, the data is all still there if you don’t click FLUSH — so don’t! 😉

But off the top of my head, I can’t give you a good reason why your comment data would have been seen as spam, without seeing the data itself. I mean, there certainly could be some false-positives tripping, but I wouldn’t expect it in massive proportions unless there’s just a big bug somewhere that I didn’t see.

chait dot net is my website, cgcode is the best address to reach me for PowerPack-related stuff. Drop me a line, and I’ll try to help work through this with you.

-d

I turned off cg-antispam as soon as I turned it on and saw it tagged my legit stuff … and I’m not sure where it left off, it didn’t tag all my legit posts… it left 30 of them alone, not sure which ones as I have manually approved the good ones that got tagged SPAM using Firefox and tabbed browsing … yeah tough work, but just boring click, click here and there and there a millians times it seems, but I didn’t have thousands of comments to approve, just a few hundred thank goodness!

I had Paged-Comment-Editing plugin installed before cg-antispam, I did turn PCE off before turning cg-antispam on, and then turned it back on when turning cg-antispam OFF — so it was a great help in getting my manually approve job done. I started to do it in phpmyadmin, and that was harder to manually do a bunch at once, as could be done with a browser with tabs!

I blindly just re-approved all the legit stuff. But this is what I think must have something to do with it since looking at my site some more:

All my comments before Feb 22 are legit. I counted 30 legit comments from today back and that count stops on Feb 22, not exactly all of the comments from that day … so it somehow must be connected to a time it was installed, I mean 1.5 upgrade from 12.1 on Feb 22, and how comments were before that, or after that … because everthing was fine with comments until CG-Anti-SPAM was turned on and was looked at.

I am therefore assuming that all my comments left on that blog when it was 1.2, were what CG-Anti-Spam tagged as spam — for whatever reason. They were all just normal comments, nothing weird or spammy at all about most of them, if any of them. I had no SPAM like comments in there, as I used SPAM WORDS plugin then to not let trash post at all.

Since seeing 1.5 and what gets marked as SPAM by WP, it only marks legit SPAM, never has marked any real comments as SPAM.

So I’d really just like a plugin to not let that junk post at all … not in the DB at all.