Teach That Spam A Lesson

Cold numb fingers and brain dead posts be damned. This is far more important. If you happened to be one of those unlucky ones running Wordpress troubled by the sudden onslaught of comment spam recently, look no further. For a while now I have successfully relied on the Bad Behavior spam filter to block all incoming spam attempts. However, due to certain…complications, it's been a while since it operated as successfully as it did a few months before. Now that has all changed.

Even though it's the first of the beta versions, Michael has been working hard behind the scenes with a little nudge from the Wordpress community to get Bad Behavior updated and smart enough to combat comment spam. After testing out what it could do with the alpha version, I have no doubt that it does what it says…which is that it blocks out 99% of all incoming spam. That gives me plenty of room not to bother manually deleting those that come through if ever they do.

Incidentally the alpha version also blocked out the entire country of Singapore. I don't know what that says about them and spam, but I'll take the word for it that it's just a Microsoft glitch.

That aside, if you'd like to see spam gone from your blog, head over to the Bad Behavior development page and download your copy of the plugin. If you can't use it, well then why don't you try using Wordpress first or even sign up with Wordpress.com instead so you don't have to bother with spam in the first place?

Given that you are already a Bad Behavior user and if you have prior versions of the Bad Behavior already running, you got to read the instructions carefully before you upload and activate it, otherwise you'd be in for a screwup. I know it might be a little daunting for some, but come on…it's either you learn or you get bombarded with spam.

I don't think it's too hard a choice to make now is it?

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Lainie wrote from on June 7, 2006 at 19:35 and said:

hahahhaha….that was kinda like a “right back atcha” to Sg’s broadcasting authority, huh?

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Kamigoroshi wrote from on June 7, 2006 at 20:33 and said:

I have no idea. It just blocks out the entire country of Singapore as well as government and corporate proxies. Which would explain why some people couldn’t access my blog to begin with. Go figure.

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Jon wrote from on June 7, 2006 at 22:21 and said:

I’ve tried Bad Behaviour. It’s probably coz I’m a noob but going through the MySQL logs, I found that the “reason” column is always empty when BH blocks an IP address and that my passwords and user logins were recorded in one of the other columns unencrypted.

Also, it blocked my Mozilla Firefox a couple of times. Had to delete cookies and cache to re-enter.

So at the end of the day, I prefered not using Bad Behaviour. Besides, my blog’s dead so no one really cares about spamming it :p

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Kamigoroshi wrote from on June 7, 2006 at 23:55 and said:

By any chance…did you clean the spywares from your system. One of the reasons why it might block you from even your own blog is that you’re broadcasting spam that you might not even know.

BB scans for attributes that relate to the user being a spambot and only records the logs for data purposes, it doesn’t “become smarter” like Akismet or SK2 so it isn’t subjected to the possibility of false positives.

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Jon wrote from on June 8, 2006 at 08:17 and said:

Yup… system’s all clean! I’m using Spybot Search and Destroy, as well as Adaware… They haven’t found anything.

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Kamigoroshi wrote from on June 8, 2006 at 08:19 and said:

What version of Bad Behavior were you using by any chance? And were you behind a proxy?

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Sashi wrote from on June 8, 2006 at 08:22 and said:

After reading your post, I went and checked my Akismet spam filter (have been neglecting it over the last week, too busy lah), and I almost fainted - 819 spam comments! In 7 days! What the-??

Thank goodness I’m not a big name - otherwise my blog would have been drowned out by now.

Updating BB coming up at the weekend - thanks for the heads-up!

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gbyeow wrote from on June 8, 2006 at 11:49 and said:

Yeah. Spam sky rocketted over the last month. Akismet and SK2 b*tch slapped some 2300 spam for me over a 3 day period.

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Kamigoroshi wrote from on June 8, 2006 at 16:04 and said:

Sashi: At one point I filtered out 10k in 7 days. I have no idea where all these are coming from.

Gbyeow: Careful with SK2, over long periods of time it can cause a lot of false positives.

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