WP Comment Spam Protection just works

  • For the past couple of days, there has been someone trying to spam one of the blogs I manage.
    This person or group of people tried spamming it from 5 different locations and made 120 attempts. Unfortunately, for them, all of them were caught by the WordPress Comment Spam filter.
    The reason I think it was one person or a group of people is that the IPs seemed to originate from Ohio University, a hotel nearby, and a public library in Athens, OH.
    The comments all had 3-4 links in them and got caught because of that. Even if they didn’t have those links, they had words in there that were present in the spamword list.
    In any case, I thought maybe I could file complaints with the University, the hotel and the public library, but am not sure if I should bother.

Viewing 4 replies - 16 through 19 (of 19 total)

  • The error was probably due to an unescaped slash in a regular expression entered into the blacklist. This has been a problem which has been cropping on and off with WPBlacklist since I hadn’t totally plugged all the holes. Hopefully, WPBlacklist 2.6 solves the problem since I think I’ve covered all the places where an unescaped slash could be inserted into the blacklist.

    Thanks to Charle97. I had installed blacklist but it wasn’t stopping the texas holdem guy even though the URL was in the blacklist. Your modification to the wp-comment-post file seems to have done the trick instead, so thanks!

    lukiss: Yes, there are some things not well documented in the upgrade which I found out from the developer via e-mail:
    (1) You need to run the installer, even if you are only doing an upgrade.
    (2) The installer has a bug. To fix it you need to do the following:
    You'll need to change the line at the top of the blacklist-install.php file which goes something like require_once("/wp-includes/wpblfunctions.php"); to say require_once("wp-includes/wpblfunctions.php"); Basically remove the slash before wp-includes.

    BTW: After upgrading I still get the same annoying error messages. It may be because i’m still using Alpha 2. Those are the risks of using beta software…

Viewing 4 replies - 16 through 19 (of 19 total)
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