Spammers using info from legitimate comments

  • Running WP 2.8.1
    Anti-spam plugin is Akismet (just upgraded to 2.2.5)

    Lately I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments where the spammer grabs the author name from legitimate comments that have been posted elsewhere on my site.
    Some of my readers are getting upset because they feel like the spammers are “impersonating” them and leaving spam comments with their names attached.

    I don’t really see a way around this (after all, anyone can put anything they want in the “name” field for comments), but I thought I’d ask on the off chance that there is a fix/prevention available.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • You could consider commentors require to register…
    Do you use the Bad Behavior plugin? Perhaps it’ll keep away the spammers too.

    Thread Starter Taipa

    (@taipa)

    I could just require commentors to register, but people are usually resistant to that it seems. I don’t have such a huge readership that I can risk losing some people over a registration issue.

    I’ll try the Bad Behaviour plugin, thank you!

    Thread Starter Taipa

    (@taipa)

    Well, it’s only been a day, but I don’t see any improvement using the Bad Behaviour plugin. I’m still getting spam comments that “impersonate” real readers.

    For the past week or so, though, 100% of spam comments that make it through the filters (usually the ones without overt spam links, or even the ones that link to google.com for some reason) use the names of real readers.

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    Try the “Cookies for Comments” plugin. If they’re using bots to do this sort of thing, then it tends to stop them.

    Regarding the Google links thing, I’ve seen a fair number of spam comments using links to posts on Google Notebook accounts. So much so that I added “google.com/notebook” to my comment blacklist to block them (Settings->Discussion).

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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