WordPress MU

Hi,

Has anybody any clue how I got over 50 spam subscriptions (new blogs) in just 24 hours after installing new template? Earlier I just got one spam subscription every week.

I just mark the blogs as 'Spam' without deleting them. Is this a good way?

Regards,
Christophe

I'm afraid you;re the only one who can looking into the matter. If they happened that quickly, either they;re all coming from a single IP address or a spammer has told his spammer friends that your site is easy and now has become a target.

I would just mark them as spam. There was a recent trac ticket that allows you to have hard coded "This blog has been deleted as it was spam" pages. You may want to look into using that for your benefit. On ours, we include a general statement explaining the many reasons why a blog may have been marked as such, a contact method if the blog was marked as spam by mistake, as well a promotional copy saying that we're tough on spam and suggesting that viewers may want to give our site a try. On a typical spam run, it's estimated that about 1-2% of email spam recipients will click on the link. May want to get some mileage out of it for yourself. :)

You may want to search the forums for 'splogs' as this topic has been covered many times previously.

either it was a coincidence with the theme selection, or there were keywords in the theme itself that brought it to the spammer's attention when they did their bot searches.

Ban the IP & the email domain, mark 'em as spam.

Also give Donncha's hashcash plugin a try.

Hi,

Those anti-spam plugins seems to block spam posts and comments, but not spam blog subscriptions (new blogs)

In the last 24 hours I got again over 50 spam blog subscriptions. :(

How to stop these spam blog subscriptions?

Try looking at your template code, especially if you simply downloaded a "free" one from a non- WP / WPMU website. I have found extra coding for adding spamlinks to your blogroll, so imagine they might be able to also build in some sort code to notify them when their template is used.

The hashcash one I mentioned is designed to stop splogs as well.

My theme (http://palmvrienden.net/) is based on the famous Cutline theme. Also my previous theme btw.

I'll try the hashcash andrea. thx

It's unbelievble how much splogs I got in the last few hours. Is this normal? With my previous theme I got a few in the beginning, but after I marked them as 'spam' it stopped.

And what benefit does these 'splogs' got with subscribing to the blogs? I also got phpbb forums, and got a lot of spam on these too :( I don't get the purpose of these subscriptions actually ...

i doubt it is template related.

there are bots that create spam blogs, splogs and once your site is on the list for the bots you can expect a heap of spam signups. wp-hashcash stopped the majority of mine.

I updated the readme.txt pointing at a few anti spam measures you can use to (try to) stop this happening.