Stop Spammers - A Wordpress Blogger's Best Friend

Political Realities ^ | 01/26/14 | LD Jackson

[LD Jackson]

If there is one thing I hate, it is spam. I hate spam email, spam snail mail, and most of all, spam comments on my blog. I take great pains to keep spam comments off Political Realities. At the same time, I want to make it easy for normal commenters to leave their thoughts on the blog, even if I disagree with what they have to say. That said, this post may only be of interest to those of you who operate WordPress blogs, but it is important enough for me to share in a post of its own.

Every installation of WordPress comes with the Akismet spam plugin already installed. It does a fantastic job of catching most spam, but it leaves me with the task of filtering through those comments to make sure a legitimate comment is not caught in the spam trap. Even though I installed a plugin that placed a check box at the comment form that was supposed to stop the spammers from leaving their trash, it continued to happen. Even placing a complicated Captcha phrase at the comment form failed to stop the comments. There were days when hundreds of spam comments are caught. This translates into several minutes of scanning through several pages of spam comments to make sure they are all spam. About the time I think I want to just empty the entire spam folder and get it over with, I find a legitimate comment that was caught.

I finally tired of doing this every day, sometimes two or three times each day, so I went looking for a plugin that would prevent spam comments from being left. I wasn't satisfied with catching them in the spam trap, I wanted to keep them from being left. Doing so would save me a lot of time in managing the behind-the-scenes operations of the blog. I believe I have found that plugin in Stop Spammers Registrations. Here is the short version of how it works.

Stop Spammers is an aggressive spam plugin that stops spam registrations, logins and comments using multiple checks. It checks several spammer databases such as StopForumSpam.com and Project Honeypot. It looks for typical spammer bad behaviors and blocks those. It extends Akismet checks to logins. It blocks access to users who anonymize their browsers, and it checks how long it takes to fill in a comment or login form and blocks users who are too fast.

The plugin is extremely aggressive and makes no apologies for occasionally blocking users who do not behave well. It will block users who install anonymizing plugins or turn off headers and cookies. Normal users will never know the plugin has been installed. The plugin installs “honeypots” to fool spammers into leaving spam with a hidden form, where they will be marked as a spammer and blocked.

The plugin is not active as long as your site is being browsed so that it does not block content, but only kicks in if a form is submitted.

When a spammer is detected, their address is added to a temporary cache so that future attempts are immediately blocked without having to recheck the spammer all over again. The plugin checks all attempts to leave a comment, register or login against StopForumSpam.com, Project Honeypot, BotScout, DNSBL lists such as Spamhaus.org, known spammer hosts such as Ubiquity Servers, disposable email addresses, very long email address and names, and HTTP_ACCEPT header.

I installed it a little over thirty hours ago and it says it has blocked over 900 spam comments. Only two of them have found their way into the spam folder. I have checked the history log and found zero legitimate comments that were blocked. That tells me it is doing the job it says it does.

As I said, I have checked the Stop Spammers log file religiously and thus far, not a single legitimate comment has been trapped. I did copy and paste the ip addresses of all of my regular commenters into the white list included in the plugin, but there has been several comments left from ip addresses that are not on the white list and it seems to work perfectly. If anyone has a problem leaving a comment, please feel free to contact me. As it is, I will be breathing a lot easier, knowing I no longer have a ton of spam to filter before I can read legitimate comment.

[SgtHooper]

Isn’t THIS spam?

[redhead]

I use WP. And I use their “Akismet” spam filter, and it W O R K S! AWESOME.

[LD Jackson]

Akismet absolutely works great. However, Stop Spammers prevents the comments from even making it into the spam folder. Coupled with Akismet, it is a blogger’s dream come true.

[Hardastarboard]

My sister makes $75 per hour working with her computer from her kitchen table. I didn't believe it either, but you should check out this website http://3r;jladsf.

Too bad the JBT's can't find who's doing this crap, show up at their door with a no knock warrant and pretend they resisted.

[GeronL]

what does she do?

[RedMDer]

We need your help to keep the lights on.
FR is funded solely by contributions made by
liberty loving people who enjoy and use it.

Every donation counts no matter how big or small.
If you can donate $5, $10, $20, $100 or more,
it would be greatly appreciated.

Free Republic 1st Quarter Fundraising Target: $85,000

Receipts & Pledges to-date: $24,042

28%

Woo hoo!! And the first 28% is in!! Thank you all very much!!

Two percent a day keeps the 404 away. 

[SunkenCiv]

I’ve been kept out of sites by CAPTCHA, it’s atrocious.

Software Learns To Crack CAPTCHAs
But does CAPTCHA-cracking bring us closer to creating a machine brain?
By Francie Diep Posted 10.28.2013 at 12:01 pm
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/software-learns-crack-captchas

R.I.P. CAPTCHA
Say hello to two-step verification and more.
By Kate Baggaley Posted 01.10.2014 at 3:44 pm
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/rip-captcha