Cleaning the Spam

Michael Dale

Well I finally got around to removing all the spam off my old websites, and I've disabled all the commenting. Awesome.

I also had some old contact forms that I was getting spam from too. These now have links to my main contact form.

My contact form also got a bit of an update, it now has akismet support.

3 Million Comments

Michael Dale

I've noticed that the web server has been running slowly today.

Anyway I think I've found the problem. One of my old blogs sites is currently being spammed. Currently there are 3.3 million comments in the database!

EDIT: Problem fixed:

mysql> delete from comments WHERE id > 556;
Query OK, 3305122 rows affected (2 min 21.45 sec)

EDIT2: The spam has been coming from caravan.ru a Russian ISP (who's logo is very similar to optus' old one...).

Defensio

Michael Dale

Defensio is an anti-spam service very similar to Akismet, except that they provide in depth spam statistics for your website. I've just written a basic Defensio plugin for Bluetrait 2 and am giving it a test. It looks pretty cool!

Spam

Michael Dale

damn, they were quick. I've disabled commenting. I'll need to go and clear out the database tonight. Sorry about the spam!

Akismet timeout, fixed?

Michael Dale

I think I've found the cause for Akismet not working as well as it should have.

The class I was using had a low timeout value; I've since increased this to 10 seconds, inline with the new Wordpress 2 plugin.

So hopefully that will improve the amount of spam being caught.

Spam System Upgraded

Michael Dale

I'm testing out a new spam system I quickly wrote.

Hopefully now if you're either logged in or have posted before with the same email address your comment shouldn't be deleted.



I plan to add more tests (see post below) later.

Spam

Michael Dale

Argh. Too much spam is getting through again; even with Akismet. So I'm in the process of writing a new spam class. The aim is to build a comment score (similar to email spam filtering programs) based on the following:

• Email Address/Name/Website
• Comment Body (number of links etc)
• If the user is registered
• If the user has successfully posted a comment before
• white and black lists
• response from akismet
• how old and how many comments a post has

So hopefully I can cut down the spam.

Spam Server

Michael Dale

I found the following address in my logs. Looks like a spamming program. Feel free to try and take it offline. http://serversinfo.org/VIP/master.php EDIT: I've changed the message so it spams it own site, hopefully taking itself offline. The stop command didn't seem to work, so this is the next best thing. EDIT2: Looks like the owner has password protected the area.

Akismet Under Load?

Michael Dale

I've been getting a few akismet time outs lately which may be one of the reasons why some spam is making it on to this site. I should do a check against that.

Spam

Michael Dale

Far too much spam on this site, I'm getting about 100 a day blocked by akismet, although a few are still getting through.

Anyway I've upped the spam level to maximum, meaning that anything detected as spam is not accepted (no comment moderation).



I do need to improve this still.