The Daily Blitz: Spam Fighting
February 13th, 2007
It looks like a new breed of spambots is upon us, and the popular spam filtering tools such as Akismet do a pretty good job (over 3000 caught spam in the last few days over on my site!). However, in the last 48 hours I’ve had a rash of about 40 identical spam posts across my Wordpress blog, and I decided to do something about it.
I figured it would be easy enough to code, since this particular spam had an inconspicuous “Great site!” Comment text, with a viagra URL hidden in the username field, of all places.
Instead of competing with Akismet, I worked with it - in fact, my plugin (No HTTP Authors) simply flags comments as “spam” and lets the other plugins deal with it. This keeps your blog running quickly and reduces conflicts.
Weasel’s No HTTP Authors Plugin even has some well-commented, tiny source code, so if you want to add your own specific filter it isn’t too much of a stretch. Future versions might even have an automated admin panel, but right now it runs out-of-the-box and works great against this particular bot attack.