Comments on: My Present Comment Spam Toolkit

By: qwe

qwe — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 14:43:54 +0000

well done http://www.google.com

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 05:35:49 +0000

Oh, John, I hear you about vigilance. The software should do the vigilance for me; it’s just not there yet.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 03:11:19 +0000

I hear you about the upgrade changes. I keep a personal change log to see what I need to change again after I upgrade.

I also implemented a hidden keyword on my Comments form, which is required to post through the “neo” wp-comments-post.php file.

(To address the question of what accesses the wp-comments-post.php page, the only two I care about are the wp-comments.php, and the wp-comments-popup.php template. (I don’t even use the popup one)

Each references the wp-comments-post.php script, and just change the name to what you changed your local file to.

And as John Wilson did. Make a NEW wp-comments-post.php so the spammers don’t realize what you did by getting a 404-not-found message.

By: John Wilson

John Wilson — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:17:48 +0000

Oh, one more thing. Viligance is overrated. I’m sick of people telling me I have to be “viligant” about software that I run. Software that I write, okay, yeah, but that’s the point: software should be written well enough in the first place so that the user can just use it.

I don’t have to be “viligant” about my car. Regular maintence, yes, watch how I drive, okay, but I don’t have to check under the hood for bombs before I drive to work every day.

Sigh. Don’t mind me, I’m just ranting.

By: mb

mb — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:43:09 +0000

If a person is to rename the wp-comments-post.php file, where else does the code need to be changed so using the newly renamed comment page still works?

By: John Wilson

John Wilson — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 22:35:08 +0000

Renaming wp-comments-post.php really works. 18.5 percent of *all* hits to jowilson.org (where my blog used to be) are grabbing my zero length wp-comments-post.php file. (That’s 547 hits just in the first week of the month.) My wp-c-p file is still stuck in some spammers tool. What I should do is set up a tar pit for it, but I’m just lazy.

Now, nobody hits wp-comments-post on crazybutable.com. I’m guessing that spammers just use google queries to find wp-comments-post files.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 21:38:52 +0000

I haven’t tried that, and I know that it works, but that leaves me with upgrade issues. Since I’ve got 60-ish installs to worry about, it’s not an small consideration.

I’m sure that 1) it works for others who have different problem sets than I do and 2) that, eventually, this won’t foil the spammers, as they’ll be able to figure out a way around it.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 21:03:43 +0000

Have you tried renaming your wp-comments-post.php file?

I did that, and I’m spam free. (At least from the mass-spam-barf-bots)

I’ve not gotten any Trackback spam, as of yet. But I’ll keep your testing in mind.