Auto-pingback spam?

  • I keep seeing in my spam log that a Spanish soccer website is creating “auto-pingbacks” for every entry that I make on my website. Their site is: https://futbolquerido.com/ (probably have NoScript set up before visiting, as who knows what kind of scripting is there)

    From the look of it, all that site does is leech posts from various blogs and auto-post their contents. I don’t allow pingbacks for my posts, and I went through my theme folder and removed every line of code that allowed trackbacks and pingbacks. I’m not sure how to stop it from happening, as the problem only started after I upgraded to version 2.5.

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  • I thought it was just my blog! Immediately after upgrading to 2.5, I’m getting exactly the same pingback and trackback- from different sites by the same thing, a partial redo of my post with varying titles. I added the bad-behaviour plugin and they got past it. I have peter’s math anti-spam but the trackbacks and pingbacks got through. I had to turn off trackback and pingbacks to stop it.

    Previously, I had 2.0.10. I never had trackback or pingback comments. But as soon as I upgraded to 2.5, they started coming.

    I’ve mentioned this in previous posts – there are too many new problems with 2.5 and 2.5.1 to be accidental or poor testing. I believe the download copy was, once again, cracked and they added the code that causes the problem in this post and the other critical issues in the forum since 2.5.

    I’ve loved my WordPress blog, but this is a major black-eye for the company. ??

    Sorry, meant to say “from different sites but the same thing”

    Ok, I think I’ve found two solutions that seem to be working, so far (incidentally, I was incorrect in my last post – turning off the trackbacks and pingbacks did not stop the pingbacks entirely from the bogus blog).

    1. In Admin/Settings/Discussion “Before a Comment Appears”, if you don’t have it selected already, select “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail”. I don’t think that was a pre-2.5 option, or maybe it was selected by default.

    2. Download the wp-ban plugin and add the ip address of that spanish site you mentioned in Admin/Manage/Ban. I looked it up on find ip address and its ip address is 74.86.186.66. Check the results after future posts in Admin/Manage/Ban, “Ban Stats” and you should see some more “Attempts” by that site that didn’t get through.

    These items don’t stop the bogus blog from getting part of your posts to display in their bogus blogs (you’ll still see them in your Dashboard under Incoming Links), but it has stopped the pingbacks for me (so far).

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