themarco

I have updated the plugin. It turned out to DETECT trackback spam just fine but not block it. Apparently the trackback_post hook is called when it’s already too late.

Therefore I’ve modified it to delete the trackback from the database immediately after detecting it’s spam.

It seems to work right now except for one thing: I can’t seem to prevent the notification emails from being sent. This means that even though spam trackbacks won’t appear on your site you’ll still get the mail. I’ll try to fix that for a next release. For now the most important thing is that it does block the spam trackbacks.

Download the updated plugin here:

https://www.i-marco.nl/wp-hardened-trackback.zip

Spam Karma is indeed a rather complex plugin. The problem however for anyone programming such a plugin is that complexity is very hard to avoid. I myself created Pivot-Blacklist which is Pivot’s premier anti-spam suite. It contains a slew of anti-spam techniques. In the beginning it was very easy to use but as spammers got nastier and more techniques were required to stay spam-free the plugin got more complex. This is something a programmer can hardly prevent from happening. I’ve checked out Spam Karma and it’s extremely impressive!

HashCash is becoming a dead end. I’ve heard there’s a thing called BlogSubmitter Pro or something that uses an actual html/javascript engine to parse and execute any code your front-end may have. It will calculate the hashcash just fine. This will probably also confuse Bad Behaviour because it now doesn’t simulate a browser anymore, it IS a browser!

Us anti-spam fighters are quickly running out of options here I’m afraid. There are some things left that still work but blacklists, javascript solutions and bad behaviour are probably not going to help much anymore in the future I’m afraid.

This might very well happen. I’ve already sensed some sort of pattern in blogs being spammed first but spamvertised in consequent spam runs later on. I found the first occurrence of spam with my weblog url in it on a topic on https://www.matrixsynth.com. A week or so later I spotted the first spam linking to THAT topic on matrixsynth.

Be prepared…

I’m one of the affected people as well. This thing is growing and growing. You can go ahead and mark it as spam and even add the URL’s of those who are affected to spam blacklists but: YOU can be next…

This thing marks the end of centralized url blacklists… mark my words.

I blogged about the whole thinghere on my weblog. There’s some more info there. This is bad… bad… bad… ??

This thing could be improved by reversing the order and using some javascript to make the scrollbar go down at each redraw. Something like:



document.getElementById('DivWithChatMessages').scrollTop=document.getElementById('DivWithChatMessages').scrollHeight;


You might need to play a bit with margins and paddings to get it right. Look at this little ajax experiment I did to see it in action:

https://www.i-marco.nl/xajax/chat.php

If you setup the shoutbox like this it will be much nicer than with the (imho) unnatural reversed order.

I think WP is a killer solution for many websites. There’s tons of types of websites that can be built with it easily and if there’s something it can’t do you just develop a plugin for it. I for one plan to use WP for clients in the future! You can simply be clear about it to your client: you’re using an Open Source tool and you’re not charging for the tool but for the customization. If I’m informed correctly you’re not obliged to make the plugin publically available since it’s a separate piece of code. If that were the case a lot of commercial vendors of Linux software would be in violation.

I just posted a small update which adds a lot of new feeds to the Ajax feed-fetcher.

WP-Taggerati 1.0 has been released. Thanks to everyone who helped testing and debugging!

read the announcement

Sounds like a great idea! I’ll try that!

That’s really weird! Can you please, just to be 100% sure you’re using the latest version, re-upload taggerati?

Just download it and unzip again into the plugins dir.

I’ve installed it on two separate WP installs and it works on both of them so I’m sort of confused here! ??

The other one is here:

https://www.i-marco.nl/test/wordpress/

Check the tag ‘comment spam’, it’s working fine there.

It is… The problem is in WP itself. It does NOT work when you use excerpts because WP strips off all html and other tags. The same problem occurs when you have a posting that contains a link. A demo is here on my site:

click

If you look at the post about ‘My plugins and K2’ you will see a text ‘DOWNLOAD’. This is actually a normal html link but it’s not shown as a link on the frontpage. On the full article view however you do see the link. I also tagged the 2-word expression ‘release quality’ in that posting in order to demonstrate that it does work.

WP simply removes ALL formatting from excerpts before you can even get it with the_excerpt() so I’m not sure whether this issue can be resolved.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature ??

No no… I think your guys misunderstand what I need. It’s for my new Taggerati plugin. The thing is, it would be nice if people can subscribe to the RSS feed of a tag. I can, at any time, automatically generate a list of posts and with the wpdb class it’s no problem to loop through them and get all stuff that needs to go into the RSS feed.

Therefore I’m just wondering if there’s some RSS builder / function / plugin or any other method available that can generate a feed just based on that array of posts.

Hope it’s more clear now? ??

This is very nice but unfortunately it won’t work for me. The posts I want to join in a RSS can come from any category. I can provide a list of posts in my code so that’s what I need to make an RSS feed of….

Fixed. Multi word tags get displayed correctly now.

On the multi word thing: It does work. The only thing is it doesn’t get linked for some reason. If you use the tags in this post block (see INSTALL file) it will show.

In this post I used ‘feed fetcher’ as an example:

https://www.i-marco.nl/wp/wordpress/2005/09/27/taggerati-more-progress/

I’ll fix the tag not being a link thing!