The MU forums have moved to WordPress.org

HOWTO (Or How I) Fight Blog-spam (7 posts)

  1. xiand0
    Blocked
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Many people think it's very cool to sign up 10 blogs and add random garbage, or something else cut'n'paste, and that's it.

    I have a sitewide RSS feed and I use that to review new entries, and I've used to nuke spam-blogs on sight. I have also use a CAPTCHA to sign up new blogs, which does help - but it doesn't help against manual spammers, and there's plenty of those.

    Now I've changd strategy.

    Now I Change Password and E-mail of the Spamblog-users. Then I change the spammed links to my sites. Then I'm done.

    This seems to make spammers immensily angry, since they have to do all the "hard work" of making the spam-blog, cutting'and'pasting in bullshit text, and I get the actual SEO effect. This actually seems to piss spammers off enough to stop spamming my site.

    It works. For me. For now. I don't know how effective it'll be in the long run, but it's a tip. For now.

    Also, use the CAPTCHA for comments in blogs. People manually sign up for spam-blogs, but I've actually NEVER seen comment spam since I started using the comment CATPCHA sitewide. People seem to bother to sign up spam-blogs, but nobody bothers manual commentspamming.

  2. Farms2
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    Which CAPTCHA plugin are you using?

    A script to do all the above automatically would be rather neat :)

    Cheers, james

  3. xiand0
    Blocked
    Posted 17 years ago #

    For blog registration:
    http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/WPMU-Captcha-for-registration

    For comment spam:
    http://www.theblog.ca/?p=21

    One little detail. You may want to change the both the default font used (there are bots who try to read them, but they don't understand non-standard fonts..) and the words used (if you download the plugin and see the default words then you can easily make a bot try them, however, some spambot who visits thousands of sites don't know what words you've put in there..).

    As for "all-of-the-above", I don't know if it's possible to make a simple plugin which reads a list of links and replaces them with some other link.

    Oh, another detail, while I'm at it. I've love to have some kind of anti-spam script which simply checks for an e-mail address and/or blogname at multiple MU installations.

    I run more than one MU and when the same user signs up at more than one blog-service then that's a clear "Wait a minute. You don't need really need three identical blogs, now do you? You're a spammer!" kind of sign.

  4. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    So what you're saying, is you leave all the stuff except you change the link to point to your site instead?

    I think the last think I want is a bunch of pages with "pill" or whatever spam content pointing to my site.

    That just isn't bright.

  5. xiand0
    Blocked
    Posted 17 years ago #

    lunabyte, you're generelly entirely correct.

    ...except for my involvement with "such" ..uhm.. webmarketing since before anyone thought of developing wordpress (or MU for that matter).

    And we all know I'm not alone in (prior) "such" involvement. We all (well, some of us) remember when "someone" got their pagerank nuked to zero because Google noticed that there were thousands of "such" sub-pages their domain.. 'nuff said.

  6. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 17 years ago #

    I think you "missed" my point.

    Me personally, I wouldn't want to have my links associated with any such content. Whether some jackass posted it on my site through a splog or not.

    Taking a potshot at Matt well, well after the fact is pretty chickensh*t. Mistakes hurt and are meant to be learned from, and public ones hurt even worse.

    I wouldn't recommend your "method" of replacing all the links to anyone. The captcha, however, is pretty much a given. Some people don't like them, but nobody can argue their effectiveness if implemented properly, and not "simple" to read.

  7. bradmkjr
    Blocked
    Posted 17 years ago #

    There is a fun idea, write simple script. If the blog is marked spam, have it rewrite the page so all links point to the root domain, or some random domain.

About this Topic