John Walker's Electronic House

Someone Explain To Me

by on Jan.04, 2007, under The Rest

Despite all my anti-spam measures, they’re still pouring in. But in the weirdest way.

I use a plugin that closes comments down on posts after about 30 days or so. This is supposed to stop the other useless spam trick where they post eight million comments to something a year old because you won’t notice (and nor will anyone reading, surely?). But here’s the weird thing: the spam is now all arriving on those posts.

HOW?

How are these evil bumfaces able to post comments to entries with no comments field? And how can I stop this tyranny?

Help me vanquish this foe.

EDIT: On the offchance that I have any avidly commenting blind readers, I’m going to switch off the comment code thing, and see how Spam Karma does on its own.


13 Comments for this entry

  • waddie

    The form isn’t there but it doesn’t have to be. A form is just a convenient way for people to pass parameters to a page. Spam-bots don’t use the form, they just pass the parameters straight to the page. If your current plug-in only removes the form, rather than setting the post to “comments closed”, the only comments you’re stopping are those from people.

    Have you tried Akismet or SpamKarma? I’ve found them to be pretty effective.

  • John

    Thank you very much indeed. Spam Karma 2 installed and already working.

  • John

    SK just swallowed your comment. Sigh.

  • Tombadil

    Have you tried not being popular? That’s working for me.

  • The_B

    You have to be talented in that field to pull that one off Tombadil. I’m not popular, I still get spam.

    Yes, I will add my support for Spam Karma. Since stealing it from Craig’s blog it’s pretty much stopped it dead for me. Or at least made it not a problem anymore.

    And as I mentioned before, it’s disturbing to see it’s creeped up to nearly a thousand caught in less than two months.

  • John

    Well, so far it’s caught three of these legitimate comments. Anyone got a tip for how to stop that?

  • The_B

    May I ask what reason it gives for the capturing of the legitimate comments?

  • John

    All it says for Type is “Cmt”.

    Nothing else.

  • The_B

    What about under the Karma heading? That usually explains how it got the score low enough to block it, if you hover over the score. (if you get a lot of regular valid comments that have similar features to the already blocked legit comments, I believe you can adjust Spam Karma to have a slightly lower Karma threshold before it blocks them.)

  • John

    It’s just giving everything a [?] and no score, which is annoying. It’s harvesting everything but my comments, I think.

  • The_B

    Hmm, the most obvious thing I can think of is that it hasn’t been installed properly or something has screwed up during the install.

    Anything on here help?

  • The_B

    In fact, looking at the footer thingy, it might be that SK isn’t connecting to the MySQL database properly, given that despite eating a fair few comments, the footer hasn’t yet changed to show the number of comments eaten or even changed from what it says when you first install it. Unless you disabled that (although then I don’t think the banner would appear at all…) So it looks like it’s picking up the data, but then unable to read it back (and thus decide whether it’s passable or not).

    …I think.

    Databases are far from my strong point, but perhaps the read/write permissions on it need adjusting (assuming you’re able to do that)? Again, I could be wrong. And if so I take no responsibility for accidentally breaking your blog.