Why can’t you…(about spammers/flooders)

  • I am not a programmer so maybe my suggestion here is stupid.

    But I see how some people are saying that it helps when you rename some of the various default files that are used for posting comments and trackback…

    Why couldn’t you during the course of the install have a configuration screen that prompts you to come up with a random name for those files… Suppose instead of wp-comments, you are prompted and you say “goose” and now that file is called “goose.php”.

    It would make it harder for spammers to find one way to spam everyone’s site as that hopefully, everyone has chosen a different name for those particular files during the install.

    Am I making myself understood? Is this possible?

Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)

  • you could, but it would be pointless. spammers can easily scrape the new name of the file from the form.

    Thread Starter Tek

    (@tek)

    But would it be worth it to get hundreds of different files names from hundreds of sites?

    nope

    spam solved?

    Another thing is standardization. Think of people trying to get help on the forums, with their goose.php file, no I mean lotion.php file or was it the sharpie.php file?

    Thread Starter Tek

    (@tek)

    Then you put something in the admin that says

    your comment file is “goose.php”.

    LOL…. this thread is funny…. how about this for throwing spammers for a loop: rename your comments.php file to spamspamspam.php

    *snickers*

    Tg

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Or, how about TG’s_comments.php ? Or, to really confuse them, index.php …oh, wait… nevermind…

    Thread Starter Tek

    (@tek)

    Not sure why its funny. No, I am not a programmer but I am a project manager and I am just trying to think of ways to help out. So far, no one has told me WHY this wouldn’t work beside conforminty issues which I believe could be worked around.

    But if you want to laugh at my attempt to help, so be it,

    Tek – get my email ?

    Thread Starter Tek

    (@tek)

    Yeah, I’ll reply in a bit. I have a question but seriously, I need to wash my hair first because it takes hours to dry and if I don’t do it now, it won’t be dry by tonight and there is snow on the ground and I don’t need a cold for my first day at a new temp gig. =)

    i gave you the reason why this doesn’t work. spammers have already beaten this. it’s not worth the 30 seconds of my time to make the change on my own installation.

    Same here. Renamed my comments file, still get spam. But it would be a nice idea if it worked.

    The comment spammers are already scraping the form to learn what your wp-post-comment.php file is named and what your form fields are named.

Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)
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