Puck’s Blog

Those damned blog spammers have been at it again. I just deleted over 300 spams from Jess’ blog.

This seems to be happening to everyone running Wordpress. Some asshole has managed to get his trojan installed on hundreds of peoples’ computers (why aren’t you running anti-virus and anti-spyware software?!) and is using them all to auto-spam every blog he can find with Google (he’s searching for the comments-post page).

I’ve stopped the mass flood of spam coming through my blog by renaming that page and changing the reference in the blog software’s code so *it* knows where it is still, but the spammer doesn’t. Doing this has stopped the big wave of spam coming through but I still get a few that get through, probably being posted by an actual human being, though really if that’s your job I’m casting my vote for your removal you service-stealing jerkwad.

So I’ve installed Spam Karma which seems to be the thermonuclear bomb of anti-blog-spam plugins. I’ll give it a test run on here — supposedly if it finds a false-positive it will give you a chance to prove you’re not a spammer, so hopefully it doesn’t nuke anyone’s legitimate comments here. If it works out well enough I’ll remove the auto-moderation for comments containing more than two links and maybe this blog will become useful again. I’ll also install it on every friends’ blog that I can.

I’ve also added a live-preview for comments, so you can see what they’ll look like before you click “Say it!”. It requires javascript turned on, of course.

Yes, it’s 4:30 am. I was going to go to bed two hours ago. Look what spammers do to me!