How to Prevent Spam trackbacks

[PurpleCow]

Hi,

I am getting more than 25 spam trackbacks every minute and this is causing a huge load on my shared hosting account and sometimes, my admin is suspending the hosting account.

How can i disable trackback
How can I delete all the existing trackbacks from the database?
Also, i can prevent spam trackback.

I am using 0.8.x version of serendipity.

Thank you for any quick help.

Cheers

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

The only way to get low traffic is to edit your comment.php and insert this:

Code: Select all

if ($_REQUEST['type'] == 'trackback') die('Disabled');

after the first <?php.

How can I delete all the existing trackbacks from the database?

MySQL: DELETE * FROM serendipity_comments WHERE type = 'TRACKBACK';

Also, i can prevent spam trackback.

Yes, by using the spamblock event plugin. However if you use the PHP code from above, all trackbacks will be disabled.

I am using 0.8.x version of serendipity.

Your serendipity version might contain security issues, please read the 'Security' section on blog.s9y.org to see if you require an upgrade.

Best regards,
Garvin

[PurpleCow]

Hi,

I tried to runt his query from my phpmyadmin,

DELETE * FROM serendipity_comments WHERE type = 'TRACKBACK';

But i get teh following error...

#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '* FROM serendipity_comments WHERE type = 'TRACKBACK'' at line 1

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Oh, sorry. The query would need to read:

DELETE FROM serendipity_comments WHERE type = 'TRACKBACK';

Regards,
Garvin

[PurpleCow]

gravin...

Looks like the new query worked.

But, I got the following warning message in my phpmyadmin when teh query was executed.

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/phpMyAdmin/libraries/header_meta_style.inc.php:27) in /usr/local/cpanel/base/3rdparty/phpMyAdmin/libraries/common.lib.php on line 1154

I hope this warning is not going to cause any further problems to me.

Thank you for any help on that warning message.

Cheers

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Hm, might be an issue in the phpMyAdmin code, but shouldn't create any problems for you!

It's only a duplicate message - did you check if the comments table shrunk in size?

Regards,
Garvin

[PurpleCow]

gravin...

I did'nt take note of the table sizes before and after.

However when I checked my serendipity admin section for trackbacks, all the 800K spam tracks were removed. does this mean the db size also was adjusted?

Thanks

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Yes, then this will have worked properly

Regards,
Garvin