Spam Wars

by Bryan

2 comments

1 Kryten42 { 09.04.14 at 3:24 am }

Good luck m8 with the SPAM war’s! Try that GASP (Growmap Anti-Spam Plugin) I posted about in another thread. It works with Akismet (at least, doesn’t seem to conflict) and is great at stopping the auto-posters and bot’s. It’s free. 🙂

As for me, I think I’ll give a couple of WPMU DEV plugins another try since they were recently updated. I’m paying a lot for an Elite account! May as well get my money’s worth! I did try them months ago, but had problems, It seems from the changelog these have been rectified. There are three that have different functions. It’s made more complex for me bacause my personal blog is simply WP, but my biz ‘blog’ is WP Multisite, and many plugins that work on one don’t work on the other!

Comment Spam Pack

Comment spam pack is a bundle of four established anti-spam plugins all modified to work with WordPress Multisite.

The pack contains: Simple Trackback Validation, Simple Spam Filter, AVH First Defence Against Spam and Peter’s Custom Anti Spam Image Plugin.

Help your users fight spam and provide them with peace of mind with these tried and tested plugins:

Simple Trackback Validation provides a simple check designed to combat trackback spam.

The Simple Spam Filter allows you to limit the number of links allowed in comments – a great way to swiftly eliminate the vast majority of comment spam.

AVH First Defense Against Spam blocks spammers before any content is served by identifying them at Project Honey Pot (an open source project to help website admins track, stop and prosecute spam harvesters stealing email addresses from their sites), a local blacklist or the local IP cache. It also checks stopforumspam.com for known spammers trying to post a comment.

Peter’s Custom Anti Spam Image Plugin provides a CAPTCHA solution.

Each of these plugins has been modified to work out-of-the-box with your Multisite installation.

Anti-Splog

Anti-Splog is an absolute must-use plugin for WordPress Multisite or BuddyPress, saving you days of work by blocking and then intelligently killing spam blogs (splogs).

Built originally for Edublogs, let us use our years of experience and the data from thousands of other Multisite networks to block and then kill the spam that’s driving you mad.

This plugin goes way beyond any other methods because at its core is the intelligent Anti-Splog API service hosted at WPMU DEV

Anti-Splog works with three layers of protection to provide the ultimate in splog killing power.

Signup prevention includes 5 methods to choose from that can limit or stop those evil automated bots that are flooding your Multisite install. These can be fairly effective, but with our experience on sites like Edublogs, a large number of splogs are manually created. While every other splog prevention plugin stops here and leaves your site unprotected, ours goes 200% further.

The Anti Splog API gets to work if the splogger makes it past the initial roadblocks. The plugin sends all their signup information to our API server, and we decide if it’s suspicious enough to mark the blog as spam right off the bat. The beauty of our Anti-Splog API service is that we crowdsource data from tens of thousands of splogs from Edublogs and other Anti-Splog users. If anyone else has run into that splogger or spam post you don’t have to worry about it on your site.

Post monitoring then takes the game to a whole new level – so where the service may not have enough information to mark a blog as spam right at signup, fear not. The second a splogger writes a spam post, no matter how cleverly disguised, our API service analyzes it and boom, that splog is shutdown.

It’s hard to describe the utter satisfaction we are getting watching splogs killed live before our eyes every few minutes at Edublogs.

This one is not actually Anti-SPAM, but it does help make real commentator’s lives easier. Some of mine will have legitimate reasons for rapidly copy/pasting comments they have previously prepared which WP will normally not allow.

Comments Control

Need to remove ‘You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.’ message when consecutive comments are posted from the same IP address? Now you can with Comments Control!

Are your users frustrated because they are publishing comments to a blog from the same location and they’re losing comments because the comments are published too soon after each other?

Would you like to get rid of that pesky ‘You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.’ message?

Once installed it adds a new Comment section in Settings > Network settings which enables you to fine tune comment throttling to:

* Whitelist IP address so that the time limit between consecutive comments isn’t applied to logged out users from that IP address

* Blacklist IP addresses if you want to prevent comments from a specific IP address

And best of all comment throttling is automatically applied to logged out users only and not logged in users.

These also now work in standard WP (which is one of the problems I had with them). 🙂

I’ll be installing these over the weekend. Hopefully, they will work! That will make me happy. 😀

2 Bryan { 09.04.14 at 8:55 am }

I would still like to have an actual ‘white list’ to keep regulars out of Spam Wars altogether. Akismet seems to be doing the job but I still haven’t turned on the automatic deletion because I want to be sure. I’m taking this slowly this time around because I don’t want another mess. I’ll probably wait a while on the 4.0 upgrade when it comes. The new ‘features’ don’t sound very useful to me, and I always wait until the .1 maintenance version is issued.