Help! My site is once again beset my spam

Hi guys,

I found a lightweight plugin called “Stop Spam Comments” that is working quite well in conjunction with Growmap on our sites. If you’re in need of a quick and free solution to this spam problem, I would recommend it.

Yes, I found the same – large influx of spam comments all of a sudden.

I removed all other spam plugins since GASP was doing great, but now I am having go back and re-install Akismet.

I don’t know if GASP just stopped working,or the spammers found a way around it…

Just joining the chorus to say GASP also seems to have stopped functioning for me and for everyone else I know who uses it. I went from 0-2 to 75+ spam comments daily. I’ve tried changing the checkbox name and I already had trackbacks turned off…no luck. The GASP plugin has been great up until now.

I alerted Gail @growmap to the issue yesterday on Twitter, and she seemed to have no idea that this was going on. She’s cc’d Andy @commentluv subsequently, so fingers crossed there’s a plugin update soon.

right, sorry everyone that you’re experiencing spam again!

it appears that the spammers have developed a way to read the name of the GASP checkbox and are submitting that along with their spam scripts..

I just tried it with a test spam script and it worked which is very disappointing!

I will work very hard on coming up with an improved way for GASP to work that is not readable by the spam scripts and hope that will help..

for now, I can only suggest using it in combination with another anti spam plugin like akismet or captcha

you only need to be listed on a ‘spam me’ site to get spammed by automated scripts that parse the page to scrape the URLs and then automated the spamming process to experience this… some spammers are even using multiple proxies

unfortunately, the anti spam game is a catch up process.. you have to get spammed in a new way for anti-spam software to add functions to counter it..

so sorry that you’re all going through this, I will put my brain to work to do something..

what’s a “spam me” site and how did we get on it? akismet pretty much fix the issue for me too but I loathe to enable it.

I noticed all the spam that did get through has commentluv though.

there is a beta version that you can try out here

https://bit.ly/13ISCOp

that adds a secret key that is used to add another check to the comment form.

I tried it on my site last night and all the normal comments came through fine

let me know how it goes for you at https://commentluv.zendesk.com

I get the following warnings when trying to save settings in the plug in. The settings do appear to save. Will monitor over next few days to see if this helps with my influx in spam.

Warning: preg_replace() [function.preg-replace]: Compilation failed: unknown property name after \P or \p at offset 14 in /home3/xxxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/growmap-anti-spambot-plugin/growmap-anti-spambot-plugin.php on line 133

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/xxxxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/growmap-anti-spambot-plugin/growmap-anti-spambot-plugin.php:133) in /home3/xxxxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 875

it looks like your php is not the correct version for the regex expression I used.

I have updated it to use a simpler one and updated the plugin at the link, hopefully that will work for you snowballfighters

Hi Andy – thanks for pointing that out. Looks like I need to investigate upgrading PHP version via my host.

I’ve tried your new drop and it works fine now. I had zero spam over night too which is also much better. Will see what shape I’m in at the end of the week.

Appreciate your support and prompt resolution to this issue. Many thanks.

I tried the beta version of the link given and installed it. Had it installed yesterday, woke up to 50 spam comments from over night, which is about average since it stopped working.

Oh dear aptharsia , sorry to hear that

There must be a new vulnerability that spammers are taking advantage of

I know I had to switch of access to xmlrpc on my site so perhaps people are using that to make comments?

Unfortunately there’s not much a plugin can do if that is the case unless the exact method that the spammers use is known

Andy, if you want to see examples of what GASP integrated with CommentLuv Premium is putting into spam versus what is getting through I have saved what I’m getting. Skype is the fastest way to reach me; username growmap.

no need, they wouldn’t make much difference if I couldn’t see the referrer and other data.

Andy,

Apologies if I’m reading this thread wrong. But is there no hope of resolving this? Or are you still working on it?

Well, Andy did release an update to the plugin. Its now at version 1.4.1, thought the Changelog is not reflecting this…

Please update the plugin in your dashboard everyone and report back here if its working for you now.