charlesarthur

I’ve sorted out how to stop spam trackbacks in 1.2 – see my blog at https://www.charlesarthur.com/blog

Does require tiny, tiny bit of file editing – as in, copy + paste three lines between two files.

I was having the same problem (trying to set it up on my Powerbook – MySQL 4.1, PHP 4.3.1, Apache .. something. Couldn’t get it to work, tried two different users.

Then tried swapping to a different user with fewer privileges, and it worked. Can’t understand it. Something perhaps about how the zip archive gets unzipped, creating rubbish characters you can’t see?

And now I just have to delete it all and work out how to upgrade from 1.2 ??

Three objections to this really.
1) Not a great idea to be hacking the comments file directly; I mean, you can, but it’s not for everyone.
2) The plugins format is designed to let you use code like this without hacking the comments file – see Kitten’s Spaminator. Really, it works.
3) Sending arbitrarily large files in “response” to spambots is a really bad idea. First, it’s your bandwidth you’re using – that’s a cost to you. Second, the computer “receiving” it is not going to do much. It’s already Trojanned, so unless you’ve got some remote antivirus in there, you’re simply compounding the problem. Meanwhile the spambot has moved on to the next Trojanned PC, which is meanwhile hitting your site with an attempted comment spam. Far better just to make the bot PC wait for your response, as Kitten’s Spaminator does.
You’re not the first to be annoyed by comment spam by any means at all. And there are better ways to deal with it.

First – those IPs you’ve found are all Trojanned PCs. You can do lookups (I recognise the one beginning 194. as probably being somewhere in the UK) and complain. It might make a difference. But the estimate is that a few thousand Trojanned PCs join the bot nets every DAY, so it’s not like the spammers are going to run out of resources that way anytime soon.
An effective weapon is the “Three Strikes Plugin” and also “Kitten’s Spaminator” (the latter builds on the former). Have a search for them. They’ll save a lot of this sort of pain, to be honest. Presently, I have 569 attempted spam comments which were auto-blocked by one or the other of those in the past week.
My other suggestion (which is on my blog) is that we should fight this guy at his own game. We should *all* claim that we’re the best online p.k.r site. I bet that this thread alone will have some fine Googlejuice if only people link to it saying “excellent g-mbling”.
There’s only one spammer, but there’s thousands of bloggers. Why let him dictate to us?

Agree – although I have had a few referrers from technorati (even in the past week), I can’t work out how long it takes new content to show up.

Yes, I already use Kitten’s Spam Words, and also Spammer Tar Pit. But “poker” isn’t in KSW (I looked, or maybe I really messed up; but it’s active in the plugins). Yes, I can delete, but that’s human effort against automata (because this was done by a machine, not a person; the person programmed many machines to do this all over the place).
In humans vs machines, humans lose. That’s why spam in all its manifestations (infestations?) is such a problem – because we’re on the wrong end of the equation.
I also prefer to let comments appear straight away: I want people to comment and to get the feedback that what they wrote appears.
I’ll consider the “auto close comments” plugin. I’ve installed it but not activated it yet.