Serendipity Forums

[basshook]

I seem to be getting spam from a bot or similar every three or four days. Not a lot just one or two or three that are similar to the following:

Author: car insurance reviews Email: tillylefebvre@zoho.com
IP: 74.221.220.37 URL: http://premierautoinsuranceonl...
Referer: my url
Link exchange is nothing else except it is simply placing the other person's webpage link on your page at appropriate place and other person will also do

Author: Opal34Stafford Email: barbarawright@mail15.com
IP: 91.201.64.16 URL: http://goodfinance-blog.com
Referer: my url
Don't you acknowledge that this is high time to get the <a href="http://goodfinance-blog.com/topics/mortgage-loans">mortgage loans</a>, which can help you.

I ban the ip address and check the box then hit the spam button but I'm still getting them. I have these settings in my config:

Emergency comment shutdown
Temporarily disable comments for all entries. Useful if your blog is under spam attack. Yes
Disable spamblock for Authors
You can allow authors in the following usergroups to post comments without them being checked by the spamblock plugin. Administrator
Do not allow duplicate comments
Do not allow users to submit a comment which contains the same body as an already submitted comment Yes
Reject comments which only contain the entry title Yes
IP block interval
Only allow an IP to submit a comment every n minutes. Useful to prevent comment floods.
Forbid direct comments (XSRF protection) 2
If enabled, visitors are not allowed to submit a comment when visiting your articles directly. This can block spambots, but also people who are commenting from their RSS readers or who have cookies disabled. This protection is implemented by setting a special hash field, which will only exist when a valid session was already started. This will also protect you from XSRF attacks that could trick you into submitting comments unter false pretenses. Yes
Enable Captchas
Will force the user to input a random string displayed in a specially crafted image. This will disallow automated submits to your blog. Please remember that people with decreased vision may find it hard to read those captchas.
Scrambled Captchas
Force captchas after how many days 7
Captchas can be enforced depending on the age of your articles. Enter the amount of days after which entering a correct captcha is necessary. If set to 0, captchas will always be used.
Background color of the captcha
Enter RGB values: 0,255,255
Force comment moderation after how many days 0
You can automatically set all comments for entries to be moderated. Enter the age of an entry in days, after which it should be auto-moderated. 0 means no auto-moderation.
What to do with comments when being auto-moderated? moderate
How many links before a comment gets moderated 1
When a comment reaches a certain amount of links, that comment can be set to be moderated. 0 means that no link-checking is done.
How many links before a comment gets rejected 1
When a comment reaches a certain amount of links, that comment can be set to be rejected. 0 means that no link-checking is done.
Hide E-Mail addresses of commenting users
Will show no E-Mail addresses of commenting users Yes
Check e-mail addresses?
If disabled, no email checking will be performed. If set to "Yes", the commenting user must supply a valid e-mail address. If set to "Confirm always", the commenting user will need to approve his comments always via email (by clicking a mailed link). If set to "Confirm once", the user has to confirm his comment once and will then always be allowed to pass comment moderation. Confirm always
Required comment fields
Enter a list of required fields that need to be filled when a user comments. Seperate multiple fields with a ",". Available keys are: name, email, url, replyTo, comment
name, email
Block bad IPs via HTaccess?
Enabling this will add IPs that have sent spam to your blog to your .htaccess file. The .htaccess file will be regenerated regularly with the forbidden IPs of the last month. No
Choose logging method
Logging of rejected comments can be done in Database or to a plaintext file (see "logfile" option below)
No Logging

I have since disabled comments until I figure out how to disallow any urls at all in my comments. Any ideas?

[onli]

The ip probably changes?

Against bot-spam, the honeypot of the spambee-plugin seems to work very well. Also, you could try to use the bayes-spamblock-plugin.

[basshook]

Onli, thanks for the reply. I have installed both to see if they will work. I also removed the other spam plugin in case of conflict.

[onli]

That's alright, but note that the normal spamblock-plugin shouldn't cause any conflict and has some helpful options as well. Hope the other ones help soon. Don't forget to use the "learn old comments"-function in the database menu of the bayes-plugin.

[basshook]

Don't forget to use the "learn old comments"-function in the database menu of the bayes-plugin

Not sure if the learn feature is working right or not. It seems I have to open another tab in the browser to collect the information from the comment required to add to the learn database instead of having a button or similar feature that transfers over the information once clicked. Is this right? If so, it seems like a lot of wasted time when your'e receiving a lot of spam comments a day. I have since set

How many links before a comment gets rejected

to 1 as it seems that is the only way to stop the spamming from occurring. I also had to disable trackbacks as it seems they would revert to that type of spamming when they couldn't get through the normal way. Unfortunate really.

[onli]

Not sure if the learn feature is working right or not. It seems I have to open another tab in the browser to collect the information from the comment required to add to the learn database instead of having a button or similar feature that transfers over the information once clicked. Is this right?

No. Got o the normal comment-area. There now are buttons below each comment for spam and ham, or you can mark them and use the buttons at the bottom of the page.

The plugin takes also care of trackbacks. If the comments get rated as they are (spam=high percent), you should enable trackbacks again and see if they get detected as well.

[basshook]

Onli, here are two screenshots of what I see when I view the comments and the learned area. I have tried clicking all the buttons under the comments area including the bayes buttons at the bottom and I still get a lot of spam even after a week of learning. I then tried to add the information into the learned area and check the spam button and hit save. Then I see the information in the database but the spam keeps coming. Not sure what I'm doing wrong but I have just set the comments to reject any links and disabled trackbacks and that seems to have stopped the buggers.

[onli]

Hi
Those images don't load for me. You could try to upload them as attachment or maybe use http://minus.com/.

How is the rating of the spam-comments? What happens when you click on the buttons, does the rating change?

[MarioH]

Hi,

can you give us another screenshot from the "database"-tab. Maybe the database-table isn't created correctly.

[mkljun]

I used the standard spam protector with captcha, Askimet key and some viagra like words in the wordfilter. However I still received some spam through.

On top of that I installed Spam: Challenge/Response plugin.
My challenge is something like: How much is 2 + 1 =
And response: 3

If they pass captcha they still must do some math. And I guess that anyone below 3 won't read my blog anyway .

I know it's a bit annoying for users to enter one captcha, let alone two. But if someone really wants to contribute, then one simple equation should not be a barrier.

So fa so good (a knock on the wood).

m

[onli]

Hi mkljun
Let me assure you that a double-captcha will indeed prevent some valid visitors from commenting. We recommend the combination of spamblock-bee and spamblock-bayes to prevent spam, with the normal spamblock-plugin if need for that exists (like your wordfilter).