wellard1981

I’ve recently switch from WordPress to Drupal, so try here! ?? https://www.wellardsworld.com/taxonomy/term/18

Yup.. i’ll probably be in there every once and a while.. very quiet at the moment! ??

It could be possible that the remote site is not accepting TrackBacks, or that they could be being moderated.

I’ve only been getting the hits more recently. I’m averaging around 4000+ unique page views a month, thats roughly 130 a day.

Okay, shamless plug for myself… but look here!
https://www.wellardsworld.com/archives/2004/10/20/wp-commentsphp/
It requires the user to be logged in to post comments, but pulls the name, e-mail and URL from the profile data accociated with that user.
All my hacks can be found at https://www.wellardsworld.com/archives/category/wordpress/hacks/
Hope that helps!
-Wellard.

@abductions:

today an unregistered user posted a comment under my name as “Admin” and then complained to me about the Blog situation. It was one of my former bulletin board members

Sadly, there’s nothing you can do about these, how to put it, arseholes! (Mod’s, please excuse the language.. it’s within context! ;)) I had one that came to my blog quite often. Fortunatly their IP address was usually in one subnet, so a slight modification to .htacces soon sorted that out.

Throughout all this, Texas Hokem has continued posting daily, even though he is not a registered user. I tried the 2 scripts suggested by Wellardsworld, but they did not stop him.

I never said my solution would be the ultimate solution, and you’ve just proved it! I later discovered that wp-comments-post.php was the file being targeted and not wp-comments.php. A few regular WP forum members put up code to help filter spammers out, including myself. So far with what has been put togeter and podz spam fighting page, we’ve managed to make it harder for spammers.

I installed and updated WP-Blacklist to block his various new URLs, but that did not stop him. Then I manually added various words, such as “Texas” or “Poker” into the Blacklist script, but this has not stopped Texas-Hokem!

WPBlacklist is once again very limited, I have it installed on my site, and it doesn’t do alot for me either. This is no ultimate solution to this problem, and there never will be, unless the developers cleverly devise a way to stop it. Can they stop it? I doubt it, because if a spammer is determined enough, they’ll get through whatever. You just have to make it as difficult as possible for them.

I know some of you feel safe because you have not been spammed again, but that only means he has not been back. I recently turned off my very popular main bulletin board because it received 1,500 spams in 10 days and created thousands of open HTTP connections which caused the server company to threaten me with much higher monthly rates due to all the traffic created by “Texas Choke ’em”. I am still experimenting to see what works and am open to your ideas.

It’s not that they haven’t tried! Boy have they tried! I would show you my apache logs, but they’ll be too big to paste here! Have you advised your hosting provider your site is being spammed? 9 times out of 10 they can help, set-up filters, etc. Who knows? it doesn’t hurt to ask them.

A DoS attack sounds like a good idea for “Texas Choke ’em”

Er, no! a DoS attack is NOT THE SOLUTION. I have a very strong oppinion when it comes to DoS. It would mean we would stoop to the spammers level, and to be quite honest, I think it would make the WP community look very bad, and not make it out to be the hero which everyone expects.
Anyway, that was my ?￡0.02p!
-Wellard.

Under Options > Default Date Format enter
jS F Y
Enjoy! ??

I think load times mainly come down to the web server load.
On a server that hardly any load, I would imagine a WP site to render in less than 5 seconds. On a heavy loaded server, obviously I would expect this number to increase.
On average, WP sites render around 3-4 seconds on my two servers.
AMD Athlon 1Ghz / 640Mb Ram / 80 GB HDD
AMD Athlon 1.3Ghz / 768 Mb Ram / 120 GB HDD
Both servers act as mail servers (each hosting at least 3 domains), they also run spam filtering, shell access, etc.
I’m quite lucky to be able to host my own web servers at home therefore I have total control over them.
I’ve not made any changes to my WP database schema either, it’s pretty bog standard expect for a small change in the _users table, which logs the time/date that user last logged onto the site.
One thing you may be able to do is optimise your DB tables;
OPTIMIZE TABLE blacklist , wp_categories , wp_comments , wp_linkcategories , wp_links , wp_optiongroup_options , wp_optiongroups , wp_options , wp_optiontypes , wp_optionvalues , wp_post2cat , wp_postmeta , wp_posts , wp_users
This can sometimes speed things up.

@anonymous: I’m affraid you’ll go it alone — I for one will not be joining you.
Personally, DDoS is NOT the solution here. If the site in question is attacked, it’ll just be moved and so on. It’s kinda like what we’re doing with the WP code. We move the goalposts every so often to make it harder for them to post their spam on our sites.
You’ll find with many ISPs, kicking off a DDoS will basically get you booted from their services, and I’m sure they wouldn’t let you back on.
Sadly, spammers are here to stay, and there is NOTHING we can do about it except make it difficult for them.

Heh! It’s was just an idea i’ve been throwing around. It’s not perfect but it does work. It doesn’t stop it totally as I later discovered, but it does slow it down! ??

@techgnome: Thats a neat bit of code. I could have thought about this myself, but I guess I wasn’t thinking “outside of the box”! ??
Anyway.. I’ve now got that, my own referal hack and a new hack i’m working on, which is an AuthImage using PHP and ImageMagik (which can be seen working on my site). So far so good, it all seems to be keeping the spammers at a safe distance!

There’s been quite a large discussion on how to stop spammers. A couple of us have put together some code to the wp-comments-post.php page being access directly, others have decided to redirect the spammer to Google.
Have a read of the thread: https://www.ads-software.com/support/4/15365

Any idea where TechGnome’s code is?

LOL! Love the idea of sending spammers to Google!
I’ve been playing again and currently writing an AuthCode hack. I know there is one out there which uses GD, however I can’t get PHP to complile with GD support very well, so I am writing one to work with ImageMagik. So far it’s been working and can be seen working on my site (https://www.wellardsworld.com).
It means making changes to wp-comment.php and wp-comments-post.php to look for the new vars (and currently a cron job to clean up which I will change). If the authcode is not passed over or incorrect, the wp-comment-post.php halts. It’s using an MD5 so hopefully spammers wont be sensible enough decrypt it too quickly.
Once I’m happy with the code, I will release it for anyone to use if anyone want’s to give it a go.

@michel v: Agreed, but thats the same with everything. For example, look how many Linux Distro’s are out there. Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, SuSE, just to name a few. If something doesn’t work in one, they’ll move onto the next.
As TechGnome pointed out, if some is determined to get in they will. There is no ulitmate solution to this problem, and there probably never will be.
The code I have submitted is just an idea to make things just that little bit harder for a spammer to do his/her job, and I have not touted it to be the ultimate solution to the problem either.
I’m just trying to help people who are getting these problems. I’ve been a victim of this spam myself, and have put in preventative measures to stop it, so far it’s been quite successful, however if the spammer was determined enough to spam my site, they will, there is very little I can do about it.