Stop the Insanity!
Posted on October 6, 2004 by Christine | 10 Comments
I’m under attack. In the past 2 hours or so, I have received over 700 spam comments. In the time it takes me to delete 20 of them, another 5 arrive. Earlier, they were from a variety of IP addresses; now they are the exact same comment coming from the same IP. Over, and over, and over again. I have comment moderation turned on in WP, but it’s going to take forever to delete all these comments. Bigger issue, I want to stop them from coming in at all.
Back in MT, I could enter an IP address and tell MT to not accept comments from that IP. I can’t find an option like that in WP anywhere.
Any WP gurus out there with suggestions? Anyone? Help? I need to stop the flood!
UPDATE: As soon as I posted this, I realized that because they are running a script to leave so many spam comments, that means they are hitting the server. When they are hitting the server, you can stop them on the server level. Doh! So there is an IP deny in place on the server itself for their IP right now. Meanwhile, it seems I have some plugins to install tonight. Jenn responded to my panic e-mail and let me know that there is a plugin at ScriptyGoddess that will allow me to delete all comments in moderation mode. I’ll be installing that in a few minutes.
Update 2: In the time it took me to write that last update, Jenn put the plugin in place for me, and let me tell you … wow!!! That is so cool! When you have a lot of comments stuck in moderation mode (or even just a few) and you want to zap them all away, the best thing in the world is her Comment Moderation – Select All For Delete plugin! Jenn ROCKS!!!
I’m all nice and calm again now. Thank you to everyone for your support!
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Comments
10 Responses to “Stop the Insanity!”
I’m Quite Clever
About Me
Hi! I'm Christine. Wife to Mike. Mom of Jason. Owned by 4 cats. Houston & Destination Wedding Photographer & owner of Hot Mama Boudoir. Blogger since 2000. Living in Houston, Texas since 1985. Living in a 1920 Bungalow in the Heights since 2011.
Want to know more? Just ask.
Extreme
October 6th, 2004 @ 5:07 pm
Spamming is getting out of control…I had over 3,000 yesterday and many are the same source lines from different email addresses. Damn those bots that produce automatic spam emails to us. Many times, they go through blog sites and pull the email addresses from them! Amazing. I wish these smart people would use their smarts on more productive work!
October 6th, 2004 @ 5:28 pm
Christine, try – Spammer Tar Pit by Dougal.
October 6th, 2004 @ 5:52 pm
To “ban” an ip – in your wp-admin, just go to options -> discussion and add the IP to the “comment spam words” list at the bottom of the page. (Then click “udpate options”)
October 6th, 2004 @ 7:56 pm
I’m having this problem, but not at the level you are.
October 6th, 2004 @ 9:03 pm
Yes, but if I “ban” the IP that way, the comments just end up in moderated mode, right? That doesn’t prevent them from going through at all. I want to completely stop them from every hitting the site. It seems I have some plugin research ahead of me!
October 6th, 2004 @ 9:08 pm
That spammer tar pit will work like that I believe.
October 7th, 2004 @ 12:03 am
I’m going to add it to my things to test out. For now, at least I’m safe from the attack of the day!
October 7th, 2004 @ 8:20 am
i use james seng’s turing test, where you type in a code that you see. this at least stops automated spamming. there are obvious accessibility issues- but i don’t have time to delete thousands of spam comments.
here’s his post about it:
http://james.seng.cc/archives/000145.html
he ported it to drupal… would it be hard to port to word press?
October 7th, 2004 @ 8:22 am
oh forget about what i wrote! now i read that the spammers have circumvented that as well!
http://charles.gagalac.us/archives/2004/01/12/movable-type-powered-turing-test/
bah!
October 7th, 2004 @ 9:45 am
Heather, with the plugin that Jenn has written to delete moderated comments (all of my spam was waiting in moderation mode, not live on the site), it took me about 2 seconds to delete 500 spam messages.
The turing tests always annoy me – I almost overlook the box, and then it takes longer to comment. I don’t want to slow people down.