Notice anything different about Weblog Tools Collection? The name of the post probably gave it away. This blog is rocking in speed and deliverability! How you ask? Thanks to the fine work of the people over at Cloudflare.com
CloudFlare is a free(mium) service that was recommended to me by our own James. He had heard about it in conversations with some folks over dinner and wanted us to try it out. While this blog has gotten loaded over the years with JavaScript from various sources and code cruft of years, it has also gotten quite slow as a result. It is not the server (though Spam storms never help) and MySql running on the same server does not help. I had added caching thanks to WP Super Cache and had tweaked most of the settings to be tolerable on the server. I had even tried a CDN at one point but […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
If you’re a WordPress user, you probably noticed an option at Settings -> Discussion, which states “Before a comment appears, comment author must have a previously approved comment.” This was pretty much the bulk of our anti-spam measures here, and while not a single bit of spam made it through, the sheer volume of pending comments (almost all spam) were driving us nuts. A few days ago, we shifted gears with tremendous results, and I though you folks might be interested.
We decided to do away with the above setting and rely entirely on Akismet, Cookies for Comments, and the built-in moderation list and blacklist at Settings -> Discussion for any that snuck through. Prior to this change, we had an average of 5 pending comments each hour, and an average of 4.8 of those were spam. Now, we don’t have to monitor pending comments, and we only see an average […]
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
Spam is not limited to just comments. If you leave your WordPress blog open to new user registration, you could be hit by a wave of spam bots or rather nefarious individuals registering with hopes that you’ll give them a chance to post spam on your blog.
First of all, do you really need open registration? If not, uncheck “Anyone can register” from the Settings area of your Dashboard.
So, what if you need open registration? First, stop the bad bots from even visiting your blog with Bad Behavior.
Now, you could certainly use a CAPTCHA on your registration form, but I wouldn’t bother with that. Several CAPTCHA have been broken by a simple program, and they just aren’t accessible. Instead, use Ban Hammer, which compares registration email addresses with your comment blacklist (just add them if you notice a trend) and the collective blacklist at Stop Forum Spam.
Like comment spam, registration spam […]
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
So, you’ve got WordPress, Akismet, and more spam comments than you can keep track of. Wouldn’t you like to know which posts are drawing the most spam attention? Well, Ozh has the perfect script for you!
Simply upload the script to your WordPress root directory and enjoy a listing of your most prominent spam magnets, complete with “a pretty interactive pie chart.” Use the script to track down and close off your spam magnets, research the keywords catching the spammers’ attention, or just do it for fun.
When I ran this script on my blog, I found two spam magnets that shouldn’t have had open comments in the first place, and all of my posts mentioning the WordPress Support Forums were drawing the most attention from spammers.
Here are the results from Weblog Tools Collection (spam comments are deleted on a regular basis, so this only includes the most recent spam […]
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.
When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.
If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.
Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern […]
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
In a blog post titles “6 Steps to Kill Your Community“, Matt listed “Allow Spam Through” as the second step and “Don’t Participate in Comments” as the fourth step to killing your community. We treat comments and reader participation very seriously at Weblog Tools Collection. We highlight commenters, try to identify the frequent comments who participate willingly and heuristically remove nofollow tags from the links of commenters who participate in the community. I have personally chosen and thanked frequent commenter by providing them deeper access and rights to the various portals, elevating and applauding their presence within the community and have chosen most of my co-authors based on their participation and passion within the communities that I purvey. In short, I agree with Matt in that relevant comments and passionate participation are the lifeblood of any community.
But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are listed […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
It was not meant to be. I had high hopes for Intense Debate but the drawbacks outweighed the positives in our case. I was really looking forward to a few of the features that I thought might bring more interactivity to the blog and encourage readers to have meatier discussions. As you notice below, we have turned off Intense Debate and gone back to the original comment form. Below is a list of the some of the features I was really looking forward to and our experiences with them.
I would like to preface this discussion by saying that I screwed up the install by adding this blog onto the wrong account and that added to some of our woes. The account bug that followed (we received some help via the support email) was caused by my fat fingering.
Better overall look and feel of the comment section of a blog: I […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
Spam in any form is annoying at its best. As a internet user, every one of us has to deal with spam. It may be in the form of emails, instant messages or comments.
As a avid always-on internet user, I deal with tons of spam everyday. However, in the time (more than 11 years) I have spent on the internet, I can tell you one thing: No spam protection is perfect, it just works 98% of times. There is always a 2% chance that it will flag legitimate messages as spam or spam messages as legitimate.
Also Read: Setting up Akismet on your WordPress blog
Relying on spam engines is not always 100% accurate. To overcome the issue of the “legitimate messages marked as spam” (some of which may be really important) I follow a certain rule. This applies to spam comments marked on my WordPress blog as well, which is […]
Original post by Keith Dsouza
Technorati Tags: blog
Now that you have optimized your WordPress settings, you are almost ready to welcome visitors to your blog, however there are also some unwanted visitors called spammers.
WordPress has a very good plugin to take care of such spammers in the form or Akismet, this plugin will block spam comments and help you keep your blog clean from spam links.
Akismet plugin is available by default in all new WordPress installations, however it does not work out of the box and you need to setup Akismet to work for you blog, in this post we will see how to setup Akismet to protect your blog against spam comments.
Activate Akismet
Before you can use the plugin, you will need to activate it, to do that click on the plugins menu and then click on the Installed link in it.
Find Akismet in the installed plugins and click on the Activate link to activate the […]
Original post by Keith Dsouza
Technorati Tags: blog
It is no secret that Weblog Tools Collection is a magnet for comment spam. I am not sure if this is something to brag about but Akismet has caught over 3,588,568 spam comments as of writing this article. We spend a considerable amount of time moderating comments on this blog and lately the time spent has increased many fold. Let me explain.
Since automattic spamming of blogs has mostly been reduced to a trickle due to the likes of Akismet, spammers are now individually targeting blog posts with highly relevant, and in many cases highly convincing comments. I moderated and subsequently spammed a comment today that was over a hundred words long, on the pros and cons of one of the themes on our daily theme posts. I thought the comment was a very well written review of theme until I looked closely. The URI of the poster was a refinancing […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
