I’ve been running this site for four months now and thanks to links from Digg and Lifehacker the traffic is starting to ramp up, but it’s also brought me to the attention of spammers. I was shocked initially by how much spam I was receiving but I’ve now been able to reduce the amount of spam messages I have to deal with to under a handful each day by following the steps below

Akismet

WordPress comes bundled with this plugin, and it does an admirable job of trying to deal with spam. However, Akismet does have it drawbacks. Firstly, every now and then the server goes down which leaves your site totally vulnerable to attack. Secondly, it doesn’t adapt itself very well to your site’s behaviour e.g even if someone is a known poster and you always approve their comments, it won’t adapt to let future comments through automatically.

Spam Karma 2 (SK2)

http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/simple-trackback-validation-plugin/Spam Karma 2, provides several additional spam protection tools that Akismet doesn’t have such as reducing the threshold for users who have already posted an approved comment, looking at whether trackback links actually link to a permalink, looking at how many comments a user has posted within a certain period (very good flag for a spammer), how long did they read a post before posting a comment i.e. is it a genuine response.

Its failings though are that although it does a good job of stopping spam getting onto my blog, I still have to clearout my spam folder daily as it does occasionally create a false positive. What it also lacks is an auto-delete option, so that any spam over a certain threshold is automatically deleted. It does have a default setting of 30 days, but this is too high for many blogs in my view and needs to be variable.

Referral Spam

I came across referral spam after reading this article on Connected Internet. Referral spam is when a site creates a fake referral which appears to come from a certain site. What they are hoping is that for servers that publish their top referrals, then their site will be featured and will get picked up by search engines. Unfortunately, when these ‘referrals’ hit a certain level like on my server, they can almost bring it down like a denial attack.

To stop referral spam you should install Angsuman’s Referral Bouncer Plugin. What this plugin does is basically turn the fake referrers away like a bouncer at a club. Everton gives a witty example to illustrate this:

Lets say my site was bobs-sexy-goblins.com and we’d banned goblins :P….i’d be told to f off and sent (back) to bobs-sexy-goblins.com, and your site doesn’t accept it, they dont see your site, apache is at ease oh and please don’t think i have a sexual infatuation with goblins - that was purely random and meant to be slightly amusing

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