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100,000 Blog Spam Comments

Today justaddwater.dk got spam comment number 100,000. But actually the real number is much higher since we have incorporated a couple of measures to catch the spam even before it reaches WordPress or Akismet.

Akisment Caught Spam Comments on justaddwater.dk

We have for example been blocking certain keywords that we found where common in spam that slipped through Akismet, or we have been changing the standard WordPress URL for posting comments. Finally we have incorporated a little htaccess hack that validates the posters referral URL. This should of cause be our own domain justaddwater.dk, but many spammers actually put some garbage into this header field – and we can then easily block it directly in the Apache web server before it even reaches WordPress. UPDATE: We also allow empty referrals (thanks Håvard, for pointing this out)

8 months ago we had over a period of also 8 months received 6,517 comments totally. Of them only 348 where legit comments! Since then we have received approximately 100,800 comments. 389 where new legit comments and 7,317 was caught in the htaccess filter we applied in July 2006. This translates to 99.6% spam comments.

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This entry was posted by Thomas Watson Steen on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 12:44 (GMT-1) and is filed under Blogging, justaddwater.dk, spam, Usability, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “100,000 Blog Spam Comments”

  1. Håvard Pedersen Says:
    February 6th, 2007 at 13:12 (GMT-1)

    I hope you are aware that the referrer field is optional and some privacy filters blocks it, so comments sent with no referrer field should be let through. I’m posting this without one, so I guess this serves as a test as well. :)

  2. Thomas Watson Steen Says:
    February 6th, 2007 at 13:51 (GMT-1)

    Hi Håvard

    Yes you are right…. and thanks for letting us know :)

    Though, now that I look closer at the htaccess filter, I see that I thought of this when I created it and also allowed refer fields that are empty:

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?justaddwater.dk/.*$ [NC]
    RewriteRule jaw-comments-post.php$ - [F]
    </IfModule>

    And as you can see, your comment got though correctly.

  3. Emil Stenström Says:
    February 6th, 2007 at 20:01 (GMT-1)

    Interesting article. I’m using Spam Karma 2 instead but lately a few comments with just random letters in have gotten through. I think I’ll try some of your ideas. Thanks for sharing.

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