BootsnAll Travel Community

Is anyone else getting spammed to death in their comments with porn ads? I've had like 20 in the past 24 hours.

Fortunately, the blogging software has been holding them all in waiting-to-be-moderated status and so none have actually sullied my otherwise respectable blog, where porn references are stictly mine to mete out.

Still, going through and deleting all these comments is annoying.

Is there anything I'm doing to attract this (besides mentioning porn now and again) or is there anything going forward I can do to avoid this in the future?

Leif

Yes - that's happening to everyone else too. There is nothing we can do at this point. We are, however, looking for ways to stop these.

Donovan

This info might help other people having this problem.

I got an email about moderating comments, how do I do that?

When the system suspects that a comment is spam, it sends you an email. You can either click on the link in the e-mail, or the next time you log in go to 'manage' and select 'awaiting moderation'.

Under 'awaiting moderation' you will see all the comments that need your approval. Decide the action you want to take by selecting the bubble next to the option (publish/delete/remain in queue/etc).

I'm still getting hit to the tune of 75-100 porn (and now ring tone) spam messages each day. Anything I can do to stop this? I'd at least like to stop the worldpress alerts from filling up my email in-box.

I will send you fewer.

Yeah, I'm getting tons of the ringtone messages as well - trouble is they're not filtered out, so are showing straight away on my blog. Any suggestions for blocking them would be most welcome!

Here's a note from Hydro, God of Blog Knowledge:

quote:

The issue is actually trackback spam, which is circumventing the little code form we make readers fill out before they post comments.

For an interim solution, bloggers can turn off trackbacks on an entry by entry basis. In the blog admin, each entry has a couple checkboxes near the top of the entry text box. One for comments and one for trackbacks. If you uncheck the trackback box (and re-save your entry), you will not be allowing any trackbacks on that particular entry.

We're also installing a better spam filter in the next week or so which should catch the majority of these.

Hope this helps.

BnA Travelbloggers,

We've installed the new spam filter. It's called akismet and you can check out what it's capturing when you click on the 'Manage' link in your travelblog admin. It should take care of the vast majority of the automated spam that gets thrown at your travelblog. It may occasionally catch a legitimate comment but you can scroll through the list to see if it does every now and again and 'despam' that comment. That comment will get submitted to a master list so akismet can better learn what is spam and what is not.

You do not need to delete spam comments that get trapped by akismet. It will purge itself every so often.

Let me know how it goes. If you're seeing spam comments still appearing on your travelblog, or akismet is capturing too many legitimate comments, give me a shout and we can see what we can do.

Cheers,

Chris

Since you installed akismet, my spam-awaiting-moderation alerts have gone down from 75-100 per day to three. Not three per day, just three.

It's delightful. Thanks!

Great news, mate. Don't forget to scan the akismet list every now and again to check for false positives. It's usually pretty good, but it is a 'learning' list.