Be Excellent To Each Other

Right, I've got a bit of a problem with comments spam on my Wordpress blog. I've tried blocking the IP addresses using a .htaccess file, but it doesn't seem to be working.

I've currently got 934 comments awaiting moderation, and countless others that have managed to get through.

Help! Basically. I have about three or four articles that need finishing off, but I don't really want to post them if they're going to get spammed all the time.

Hahaha, yeah you have.

Still, it's an excellent website.
Viagra.

I was laughing about it with DocG the other night, from memory he knew what you needed to do.

SpamKarma

Less laughing, more helping.

Told you, I don't know what you need to do, but the Doc does.

Great site, I'll tell all my friends.
Viagra.

Akismet. It's a distributed spam-scanning comment system co-ordinated with a central database at the Wordpress mothership. All comments that are suspected as spam are put in a special queue and only posted if you specifically allow them.

We use Akismet on Cult of Mac, where it's captured about quarter of a million spam comments, according to the stats (the site gets a couple of thousand per month); very little spam leaks through to the proper comments moderation.

Ooh, excellent. Thanks guys.

See, told you.
Viagra.

Viagra.

V1AGR.a

P.en15

Bride-me-do 0870 696969

You're one sick canadian goose.

I'm also innundated with spam comments and spam trackbacks/pingbacks.

You need the Akismet anti spam plugin. It checks all of your comments against their database and automatically detects spam for you. It's 99% accurate as well. Great little plugin.

http://akismet.com/

edit: Bugger, people have already said.

The sentiments are still appreciated, though - cheers.

NOT SNAPPY ENOUGH SIR!

Mods, can we split out the Games with Crocodiles in them stuff to its own thread. It's of drastic importance that we list these for the ages.

Will do

But I want myp's thread to have as much junk in as possible.
Viagra.

v1@gr4

Does that help?

On a serious note, what do spammers achieve from doing this? Do they actually manage to sell viagra to people using these methods?

One would assume so, yes, otherwise why would they bother? Even a 0.5% hit rate would make them muchos money.

From what I've read, it's more like a quite literal one in a million being enough to make them a profit. As the comments on an average YouTube video will suggest to you, there are more than enough idiots on the internet to make that a viable business plan. "Hang on. You mean that by clicking on this simple link within a comment posted in the comments section of a video of Russell Brand saying "fuck" a lot, I can take out a loan that will solve all my problems? OMG LOL sold!"

ViagraCializ Pills at LowestPrices.

What they're looking for is backlinks. However, by default Wordpress has a "nofollow" tag in the comments section added to any links. Therefore their backlinks are rendered useless in the eyes of Google. Backlinks = You get a lot of links pointing to your site saying "viagra", you become number one in a Google search for "viagra".

edit: Exactly what Mr Chris is hilariously trying to achieve in his signature

Turns out Akismet was installed already, I just hadn't activated it.

Now to delete all the spam that's still on there.

That turned out quite well considering how pissed I was! Wahey! The Mirror's Edge session afterwards didn't fare quite so well.