richardw

Thanks Podz and Ringmaster for helping me sort this out.
I can see that if one were actively using the moderation list on all posts that the way I’m using it would be a drag and one would want another method.
I guess for me, I’m vaine enough so that even though my weblog is not all that popular, I don’t want “video-poker” posted publicly in an active comment list. Of course, I’d rather catch it before it gets in the database but until I get to that place, using the url number filter seems like a useful tool to me.
Since I’m new to comment spam, my question for all of you who have gotten a lot of it is: do you think this will get a lot worse before it gets better? If so, how much worse?
Just out of curiousity, what does Mr. Video poker get out of a click through? What’s in it for him besides digging into weblog directories to figure out the file names of comment engine files?

I may be mistaken and I’m willing to hear how but at least for the time being, I’ve solved the spam problem with this one guy at least by using WordPress’s built in url counting filter.
What strikes me amazing is that I’ve posted numerous times about this and I’m being told that I’m not undersanding, this guy can get through anything, blah blah blah.
Here’s what I saw:
1. WordPress has a feature which should have worked but wasn’t (Options, discussion, limit urls in comments and any more go to moderation que)
2. WordPress somehow has a rather narrow view of what an url is: “http:…” and “… .com” etc.
2. This guy is posting three urls that look like this:
https://www.poker.com
https://www.somethingelse.com
https://www.anotherurl.com
Actually, there’s a number before the first one and I wasn’t sure what that meant but it’s irrelevant to what a friend and I did.
3. He’s getting through because WordPress is looking for http and he’s not using it. Duh.
4. I asked my friend David to dig around and find out where in WordPress the code is that looks at comments and sorts out the good from the bad.
5. David found that code/function and modified it to look at urls in a smarter way.
6. All of this guy’s comments are now going to moderation. He has not posted a comment yet that got through.
Now, I may be missing something and I’m sure you’ll all jump on me for being stupid but we added no hacks, we did nothing except make WordPress work the way it ought to.
If what we did is meaningful, I hope it gets into the next release of WordPress. Again, I may be mistaken but I’ve been hit a few hundred times by this guy and variants of this guy and the last 20 post this modifiction have gone to moderation where none were going there before.
I’ve asked David to follow this post with the name of the file and the code modifiction he made.

It’s simple: the video poker guy is posting multiple urls in his comment spam. WP has a feature to deal with this. It does not work.
I have it set to 1. He’s still getting through.
I just tested this feature in 1.3 and it’s broken there too.
Again, why have a feature if it doesn’t work? Or, is this guy doing something that gets through it? Or, are there a combination of checkboxes above that need to be checked to make this work?
Sorry, but I’m reluctant to install hacks and go nuts with this until I know why a built in feature is not working.
Anyone?

Could someone here tell me why this guy is getting through a wordpress setting?
I have urls in comments set to 1 and this guy regularly posts 3 and gets through.
How? Is that feature broken? Is it fixed in 1.3?
I mean, all of these hacks are great but it would seem to me that this simple feature of off-the-shelf WordPress ought to work, yet it doesn’t.
Why? How is he getting through it?

Moshu,
I’ve read that page and will try more of those ways but my question for this thread is this:
I changed the back end of my site so that comments with more than one url are sent to a moderation que.
This person/bot is posting 3 urls and getting through.
Why?
Either I’m doing something wrong (and this is entirely possible) or this feature, at least on my install is not working.

This did not work but I’m seeing that he’s getting through the pref that if the comment contains more than one url to send it to a que. I set that field to “1” and 2 or more links are getting through.
is this a bug or is there something I’m doing wrong?

I was just in the middle of an attack by the poker guy and asked the above questions about the form of urls and why www alone was getting through.
I turned off the plugin autohyperlink urls and that seems to have allowed the link number catcher to work. I’m not sure yet but I’m hoping.

The “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than x links.” only works if the links begin with “http”
I’ve dropped that down to 1 but I’m getting spammed by the poker guy with:
https://www.xxx.com
https://www.yyy.com
https://www.zzz.com
Is there a file somewhere that will allow me to list other forms of urls to check for more than 1 of?
Also, has anyone in this thread updated to 1.3 and used whatever it has to block spam? Worth the upgrade to solve this problem?

I’m having the same problem and it would be nice to use that “slug” instead of a post id for a permalink.