Special Characters in Comment Blacklist

  • Adam Powell

    (@adam-powell)


    10 years ago

    I have been getting a lot of comment span from a bot that posts malformed ‘spintax’ comments.

    The first actual words in the comments are
    {I have|I’ve}
    so I added that to my comment blacklist yet it doesn’t seem to be working.

    Any idea why not?

    Related notes:
    As an SEO I thought the first one was entertaining so I “approved” it and lampooned it (I’ll be fixing that soon, I’m going to take a screenshot, delete the comment and do a blog post on it, I’m concerned it is contributing).

    I have been adding the IP address to my security plugin (which adds it to my .htaccess) but in the last 24 hours it started coming from a new range of IP addresses;
    I blocked the entire range using a wild card operator *

    None of my comments are approved without moderation and I’m a sophisticated user but, surprisingly, I couldn’t find anything about why adding that as a blacklisted word wouldn’t work or how the blacklist handles special characters (if there are special characters, like RegEx or escapes or sanitized characters, which is the only thing that seems likely to me).

    If there are special characters, can I escape them?
    "{I have|I’ve}"?

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