confused. recieved a comment from a form I didn't know existed on my site.

  • Hello all,
    I have a site that I recently designed. I just got e-mailed a request to moderate a comment (spam). The confusing thing to me was that the page commented on doesn’t exist as a page I created. It is structures like this:
    https://domainname.com/category/1
    https://knoxville-landscaping.com/landscapes/1/ to be specific. I don’t have a “landscapes” page, but, sure enough, there is a comment page. I started plugging in different categories after the domain name and saw that I can pull up archives of those categories that way. If I add a /1 at the end, it seems to change things too. How did the spammer do this, and what exactly is going on? Thanks so much?

    I hope that it is ok to include the actual url here. I thought it was necessary to properly explain my question. I don’t mean to spam anyone.

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  • Phil

    (@owendevelopment)

    Most spam are generated through ‘bots’ than scan the web looking for forms.

    Chances are, it has been programmed in such a way that it knows that for tag / archive pages, it can add something like a /1 and get a form.

    Clever eh? Notice, if you put a /2, it also brings up a comment form.

    Anyway, I would ensure that there are no posts, pages, tags or archives stored in trash (after previously deleting them), or make sure that there aren’t content pages set to ‘private’.

    Other than that, I ALWAYS open:

    ‘Settings’ –> ‘Discussions’

    and alter the ‘Comment Moderation’ section to:

    “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 1 or more links.”

    By setting this to 1 link, (as spammers always add links to their spam mails), it immediately blocks anything with a link in the comments.

    You’ll find your spam becomes non-existant.

    Hope this helps.

    Phil

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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