I forgot to mention yesterday that I actually got hit by a real comment spammer. Can you believe it, lil’ ol’ me?!?! I think putting links to your site on mine might actually decrease your page rank. For the most part any spam is quickly moderated by WordPress because I set a limit of 4 links per comment (a limit that has only caught one real comment in its trap). That lets me delete most of them before they even see the light of day. This guy (we’ll call him… fioricet), seemed to figure that out and only used 3 links. Tricky bastard. So a few actually appeared on the site before I got to delete them and ban his IP (and then the second one that he switched to).
The one thing I like about these guys is the random text that they grab to make it seem like they’re for real. This guy happened to quote Futurama:
Leela: Ah, maybe they’re right, maybe Nibbler is dumb.
Fry: Don’t listen to them, Leela. People said I was dumb but I proved them!
I almost left the comment and just deleted the links. They hit me with just over a dozen comments, so it wasn’t a big deal. Even if they all got through it would have taken me less than 30 seconds to delete them all. But it still makes me wonder, is my site really worth it? Sure, I’m still the one and only indieb0i, but that really doesn’t help my pagerank, much less anybody else’s. Probably time to look into one of the plugin solutions, such as Kitten’s Spam Words.
In the meantime, I am actually working off of the WP nightlies these day, and am seriously looking at a redesign. Most likely it will be based upon Michael Heilmann‘s wonderful Kubrick theme. In case you didn’t know, there’s a possibility that some of that design will find it’s way into the default template for WP 1.3. Sadly, a lot of people don’t think well for themselves and a near war broke out on the forums because of this pseudo-announcement. (Note: Feel free to read some of that exchange, but please don’t add to it. The thread appears to have finally, and rightfully, died.)
The plan was to write a whole diatribe about the stupidity of those involved. Well, at least those who were most responsible for the ridiculous assumptions that created the problems. But instead I think it is more important to focus on the positive, so I will simply direct those interested to Matt’s discussion of the matter. You might also find Joen’s write-up to be higly enlightening. For my part, I feel perhaps the time is coming for me to step up and really help out the community. I will be looking for ways to help out with WordPress, as soon as I take care of my own shit.
I got bitten by the same spammer. He/she spammed me a couple of months ago, so I added the IP range to the banned list. As a result none of the recent crop of 30-odd spam comments ended up on the site. Still, it’s annoying to have to deal even with removing all that junk from the moderation list. Grr.
Spammer and other cyberhooligans are a pain in the ass. I have a couple of pranksters bothering my blog as well. So I install different security stuff every couple of days … so they have some work to do. 😉
On the subject of page ranking: my blog is very high on certain art or social issues, which IMHO sucks, because I get a lot of visitors who expect some completely different content related to the search pages I was listed. Blogs simply add too much noise to google and others. And high page ranks wont bring you good (returning) readers – mostly only disappointed visitors.
I’ve found that using a word catch I’ve caught pretty much 100% and I don’t think I’ve had any false-positives.
Just got hit again by the same one today. Coming from the same 2 IP addresses (61.30.47.22 & 61.30.47.21 if you want to add them to your blocked lists 😉 ). It’s a pain to deal with for sure, but I’m just thankful that WordPress added in the multiple comment moderation and editing modes before I ever got hit by a bunch of spam. Certainly made this much easier.
And yes, the word list certainly seems like it will at least make catching them that much easier. I’m fine for now, but if anymore hits, I’ll be looking for a much stronger solution.