Comments on: More ways to stop spammers and unwanted traffic

By: Donncha

Donncha — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:14:22 +0000

Thanks, I was trying to debug an obscure problem with wp-super-cache, static homepages and a permalink structure with the category and postname. After 20 hours of testing my server worked perfectly. Grrr.

I’ve reverted everything back, unfortunately that means these posts will be seen as new again by WordPress Planet.

By: AskApache

AskApache — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:37:19 +0000

I’ve really learned alot from this article.. (its a oldie) Thanks for doing all this research and highlighting a preferred way to combat spam is at the HTTP protocol level not the PHP application level.

I re-found this article from you moving your url.. BTW.

By: .htaccess Tutorial – The Ultimate Htaccess Guide

.htaccess Tutorial – The Ultimate Htaccess Guide — Sun, 10 May 2009 09:23:59 +0000

[...] obvious trackback spam. See Holy Shmoly! [...]

By: Hikari

Hikari — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:09:32 +0000

That’s interesting. Unfortunately I don’t think I have access to that info on my host, and I’d not know exactaly what I’d be doing anyway

By: Clay

Clay — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:26:11 +0000

So, is this the ultimate list of ‘donncha’s rules for stopping spammers’ (skipping Cookies for Comments and AVG LinkScanner stuff):

`
# stop requests with no UA or referrer
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^$
Rewritecond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^64\.22\.71\.36$
RewriteRule ^(.*) – [F]

# stop requests to wp-comments-post.php outside of /
RewriteRule ^(.*)/wp-comments-post.php – [F,L]

# bad user agents for Trackbacks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(Opera|Mozilla|MSIE).*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^POST$
RewriteRule ^(.*)/trackback/ – [F,L]
`

By: .htaccess Plugin Blocks Spam, Hackers, and Password Protects Blog | It Is Working

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 07:15:02 +0000

[...] obvious trackback spam. See Holy Shmoly! [...]

By: It Is Working » .htaccess Plugin Blocks Spam, Hackers, and Password Protects Blog

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:04:58 +0000

[...] obvious trackback spam. See Holy Shmoly! [...]

By: Scheduled Wordpress Post Problems — Joe Bivins

Scheduled Wordpress Post Problems — Joe Bivins — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:30:18 +0000

[...] another useful article here which provides additional tactics for removing unwanted traffic. However, one of their tactics to [...]

By: James Farmer

James Farmer — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:24:32 +0000

Very cool, have done, thanks

By: Donncha

Donncha — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:22:55 +0000

James – it should be safe enough to disable those rules now anyway as AVG have released an update that removes their link scanner!