WordPress MU

On average I get one or two new blogs signing up a day, however only one in every three actually logs in and starts using there blog.

Is this a normal statistic? How do I tell if a blog is just a spam blog?

Pretty normal. Loads of people sign up, poke around, and leave. You can tell it's a spam blog by the blog name and/or username. Usually it's obvious because it's nonsensical.

Usually it's obvious because it's nonsensical.

Hmm, that would be a good idea for an article. How to tell a splog from just the name. What signs to look for.

One of the things we've done on our installs is add the ip address from where the person or bot has signed up from to the email notification the admin receives about the new signup. That way if you get a run, you'll note it since you'll be seeing the ip address over and over again.

1 out of three is rather high in my opinion. That's a very good number. I'd have to go check but I think 10-20% is more normal for us. At least after the first month.

Hmmm, another good idea for an article: How to get folks to stick around.

Thanks for the feedback, tdjcbe I took your advice and started recording the ip address of blogs on sigh up, then I block any span ip addresses in my .htaccess. Seems to be working well and works equally as well with comment spam, my comment spam has been cut by about 70%

I think some advice on getting folks to stick around would be great, I will definitely be reading that article thanks.

Just to throw this in, we have the email that the site admin gets with the information about the new blog also send along the ip address that created the blog. It's a plus.

We do the block-on-ip comment protection as well but we run a complete sitewide solution across all of our servers, not just our wpmu installs. Get tagged as spam five times within an hour, the ip address gets dropped into the firewall block list at the routers. We only block for four hours though. Most decent datacenters will usually have the issue resolved after four hours if the spam is coming from a hacked box. If it's coming from a cable or dsl user with a hacked box, well, they just go back in the block shortly afterwards.

We do have about 3k ip addresses on the permanent block list though. Hit the list 5 times within a week and I get an email for review.

Since I switched to a renamed signup p-age and moderated, I hardly get any spam at all anymore. I can't even remember the last time a spam signup came though.

I'm sorry but I still have an issue with that. There's too great of a risk of a false positive and you booting a legit user.

Yes, if it's 100% positive it's a spammer (ie Anyone else getting those "I'm sorry for this spam but..." comment spams that we're seeing for the past few days?) then boot 'em. If it's 50/50, let them in but either keep an eye on them or assume that they'll pop up on your sitewide post feed as such.

Of course we've modified our "This blog has been deleted as it was a spammer" page to include a link back to the main site. I don't mind ToS'ing splogs. If those spammers are going to go through all the trouble of linking to their now dead site, I say take the link credit for their hard work. :)

I get maybe one new signup a week. Maybe two, and in a niche where people tend to pick pretty obviously related usernames and blog names. any of the ones I'm not sure of, I email them back. If I get a response, I let them through. There's a message on the signup page that says to email support if you don't get approved in 2 days. Any LEGIT ones I don't get around to email me almost every time.

I'm not suggesting everyone go this route. Just laying it out there as an option. Out of all the sites I've set up, I've used this way once.

I got 15 signups just within that last 8 hours (-.-) i get around 10 signups a day on avarage around 4 tend to be bloggers who are new 1 tends to be a good blogger and the other 5 tend to just either never come back (and after a month of no posting at all (in the sense that they still have the defualt post only) then i deleate them off. I have over 670 bloggers and i think only about %30 are true bloggers 50% are newbies and the last 20 is spam bloggs i dont mind (i simply added a remove link plugin on their blog) or just posted once or twice.