Girl Geekette

No Spam

As a Wordpress lover, I also fight my share of Spam. When I was able to drop my daily comment spam rate from over 400 comment spam a day to less than 30 a day, I was ecstatic!

Although Akismet does its job by seperating the Spam Comments from the Non Spam comments, I still had to go through and make sure that the ones caught truely are spam.

Using Akismet and a few other great tools, not only am I able to cut tons of comment spam out, I am also helping out to catch spammers.

No, I am not trying to sell you anything, I just want to pass on how I was able to do this.

Since late 2005, I have been a member of Project Honeypot. It is a great way to set up a honeypot to attract spammers. The best part is, all of the spammers caught there are documented.

Recently, Stuart Ryan released a Wordpress plugin that takes advantage of this wonderful resource and makes it easy to combine into Wordpress.

By combining Stuart Ryan’s WP-HoneyPot, the reporting capabilities and services of Project Honeypot and the WP-Ban Plugin from Lester Chan, I was able to drastically drop my spam rate from over 400 Comment Spam a day to under 30 a day. Talk about a major improvement!

To make things easier, I took the ip addresses that Akismet caught, the top 50 Comment Spam IP Addresses from Project Honeypot’s list of US and All Time Comment Spammers, and then combined them into a BAN IP address list from WP-Ban Plugin . The WP-Ban Plugin also lets me set a message for banned IP address in case someone who is not a spammer cannot access the website:

You Are Banned.

Please note: being banned from this site does not necessarily mean the IP address is owned by a spammer. For example, it may have been hijacked from its true owner, or it could be in a DHCP IP Pool where someone before you has spammed. If you believe an IP address is listed here in error, contact me and I will investigate.

This way, if a person is wrongfully banned from the site using the WP-Ban Plugin, I can unban them if I investigate it and determine the user is not a spammer.

I keep a running list of bannded IP addresses that I just copy and paste into the WP-Ban Plugin area for ip addresses on each site I use. Then I set up the WP-HoneyPot plugin and add my domain to Project Honeypot.

All of these resources together have helped me reduce my spam count and I also enjoy knowing that I am actively helping fight spam!

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