5 Super Easy ways to Stop Spam Before It Hits your Blog!

[Bloggeries]

Shoemoney, one of the world's most recognized bloggers posted this list on 5 Super Easy ways to Stop Spam Before It Hits your Blog!. I hope it is useful to everyone here.


Unless your Lisa Picarille from Revenue Magazine ( check the trackbacks on this whoper )you know that you would have to be a idiot to automatically approve all comments and trackbacks on your blog right? Well Even that is a pain in the ass so I made a list of ways to stop the spam before it gets that far.
I have come up with the 5 easiest and best ways to fight comment spam. These are ways to stop spam from ever getting to your blog…. btw if you dont know what akismet is then stop right now and set that up first. This is just to help you stop the spam from even getting the that level. The first 2 require editing of the .htaccess. The rest are wordpress plugins.


5) Deny Access to No Referrer Requests
When humans comment on your blog they have read the post and leave a comment. This of course leaves the referal from your blog. One easy way to block spammers is to check for the referal. Simply paste the lines below into your .htaccess file in the root of your webserver.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$ [R=301,L]
What you need to edit:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php* - If you are not running a wordpress blog then you will want to change that to the file that gets the post for comments.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* [OR] - obviously you want this to be your domain.
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$ [R=301,L] - this is where you are redirecting them too. This probably does not matter since the automated spambots will not follow redirects.
Done!
4) Kill tor anonymous proxies
Thats cool people want to surf anonymously and all that but being that about 75% of my comments come from tor proxies its much easier just to block them.
simply go here and copy this to your .htaccess to block all the tor servers
3) Stop Comments On Older Posts
Spammers target older posts for 2 reasons.
A) they show up in search engines and thus they know:

• search engines value the page pr wise
• it could be relavent to the keyword they are trying to spam

B) You wont see it. - since the post is old its unlikely that you would ever notice thus greater chance of sneaking it by you.
You have a few options to fix this-
You can manually disallow comments for posts after x amount of days (ick)
If you have wordpress you can download this plugin
which will automatically close off comments and trackbacks after 21 days.
If you have some h4×0r skills you can setup a cron job (thats a automated task to us ninjas) that will edit your database directly checking for past posts and setting the comments and
2) Blacklist Repeat Offenders:
When some spammers do get in you can blacklist there ips so they wont ever be able to again… this process does suck a bit but its a option.
Again edit your .htaccess file:

order allow,deny
deny from 192.168.1.1
deny from 192.168.1.*
allow from all

Remember * represent wildcards
1) Rename your comment file
The default for wordpress is wp-comments-post.php by simply renaming this file to say… wpc.php then changing your theme to reflect the different location for the comment file you will ward off a TON of spammers. This will kill 100% of the automated spam bots.
Your probably saying to yourself… well so what? How could this effect my revenue! Well the answer is all the hardwork and time you have spent building the reputation of your site can be QUICKLY destroyed by giving these spammers NAKID (no link condom) links. You know what they say… Imagine everyone you link to and who they have linked to and who they have linked to …. eek!
A good resource I like to read from time to time is SpamHuntress

[LennyP]

Good tips, except for number 3. Many times vistors will find your blog through a search trhat brought them to the older page instead of the home page. Allowing them to add content will only help your site. If you moderate your comments, which you should, then there is no reason for such a crude measure.

[solidghost]

How about Akismet?
Works great for me.

[gosfgiants]

I'm afraid to edit this below without some input. HOw would I edit the code below for my site http://www.dollarsblog.com/blog where the blog is in the blog folder.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$ [R=301,L]
What you need to edit:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php* - If you are not running a wordpress blog then you will want to change that to the file that gets the post for comments.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* [OR] - obviously you want this to be your domain.
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$ [R=301,L]

[Cartman]

Yeah, I saw that post on Shoemoney's blog the other day.. Sounds great, but honestly, Akismet catches 99.9% of the blog spam, and since I moderate comments, I catch that other 0.1%.

[Bloggeries]

I'm not very familiar with .htaccss. I understand it's purpose but editing I cant' help you. Have you tried the application Akismet everyone talks about for catching spam?

Originally Posted by gosfgiants

I'm afraid to edit this below without some input. HOw would I edit the code below for my site Dollars Blog where the blog is in the blog folder.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$ [R=301,L]
What you need to edit:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php* - If you are not running a wordpress blog then you will want to change that to the file that gets the post for comments.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* [OR] - obviously you want this to be your domain.
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$ [R=301,L]

[solidghost]

Originally Posted by Cartman

Yeah, I saw that post on Shoemoney's blog the other day.. Sounds great, but honestly, Akismet catches 99.9% of the blog spam, and since I moderate comments, I catch that other 0.1%.

Not too sure how many percent, but I have very very little spam on my blog nowadays. Akismet is a life saver (and a time saver as well).