Comment spam with control characters

Spaminator Checks for this sort of thing.

https://blog.mookitty.co.uk/wordpress/spaminator/

Thanks, I’ll check it out.

I just got this several times and and I’m running spaminator.

You could always try a captcha:
https://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/spam/#three

or Jeff Barr’s hack:
https://www.syndic8.com/~jeff/blog/index.php?p=103

Is this what the January 10 update to Spaminator was for? I’m upgrading to that now.

Each character entity is treated as a point, so there has to be more than a couple to kill the comment. I’m thinking of changing the default to 2 points/per.

Also as I improve the admin page, the points for each kind of offense will be user settable.

@kitten – I’m using cvs code, and the latest version of Spaminator.
Noticed last night when I edited a comment that I saw the Spaminator ‘comments’ it uses, and then this morning a comment emailed to me has the same stuff:

<-- X-spaminator-strike: whitelist, -3 --><-- X-spaminator-passed: IP check --><-- X-spaminator-passed: email check --><-- X-spaminator-strike: empty field - author url, 1 --><-- X-spaminator-passed: author url --><-- X-spaminator-passed: comment body --><-- X-spaminator-strike: url dashes, 1 -->

It is not the slightest problem as everything on the blog appears just fine, but I thought I’d mention it.

(Note: The ! character has been removed from the above so it displays)

Yeah, that’s kinda cool, ain’t it ??

It’s documented in the change log. It does 3 things:

1. Gives you more info about what processing was done.

2. Provides meta data about a comment’s ‘spaminess’ and could be extended by further processing of the comment, like Spam Assassin headers in your email.

3. Proves that it’s working to the skeptical.

Apologies – I didn’t read the changelog.

And yes – it is cool ??