Comments on: Stopping Spamblog Registration in WordPress MultiUser

By: Forum cheat sheet - WPMU Tutorials

Forum cheat sheet - WPMU Tutorials — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:50:16 +0000

[...] Stopping splogs Cookies for comments yes it says comment but it does check for splogs too. Hash cash Same deal. Don’t let the mention of comments fool you. Stoping spam bogs in WPMU [...]

By: dnorman

dnorman — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:11:32 +0000

it’s certainly not bulletproof. actually, I’m not even sure if it works anymore. the bots seem to have adapted. I use reCaptcha as well, and am still getting up to a dozen splogs created per night. It’s definitely better than it was before, but some are still sneaking through. The only consolation is that they must be manually entered, so the sploggers are wasting their time, too. The funny part is, they always forget to change the blog/site privacy setting for their sites, so they all block Google from seeing their new sites anyway. Sigh…

By: Ændrew

Ændrew — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:01:51 +0000

Thanks for the tip! I just implemented it on my BuddyPress site as per Cheryl Johnson’s modifications, hope this is a little more successful than the various CAPTCHAs, filters, hashcashes, etc. I’ve installed. Presently, I have something like 8 antispam plugins on my site and none of them do the trick…

Also, on an unrelated note: Go Dinos!

By: mkane

mkane — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:59:33 +0000

Thanks for the useful post and your spam prevention page is love. Keep up the good work

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:43:27 +0000

I’d been using a different rule to redirect curlers to a spank page, but just switched to use your simpler deny rule. Thanks for the nudge to update that.

By: stuartm

stuartm — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:07:41 +0000

I managed to fix my spam problem pretty easily. I checked the access logs and all the splogs were created with “curl” in the user-agent. This is easy to block in the htaccess:
#Spammer
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^curl” blog_spammer
order allow,deny
deny from env=blog_spammer
allow from all

I’m sure I’ll have to modify this in the future when they work out a way around it, but for now I’ve gone from 20 or so splogs per day to zero.

By: WordPress MU WPMU Multi-User Blogs Help Tips | Behind the Scenes » How to Stop WPMU Splogs - End WordPress MU Spam Blog Registration

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:56:07 +0000

[...] complete details, or to ask any related questions, please visit his original post about how to stop WPMU spam blogs with .htaccess file edit. Be sure to read the comments there as many concerns have been [...]

By: Bookmarks for November 18th through November 19th « LostFocus

Bookmarks for November 18th through November 19th « LostFocus — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:01:34 +0000

[...] Stopping Spamblog Registration in WordPress MultiUser : D’Arcy Norman dot net – Looks useful-ish. [...]

By: Armand

Armand — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:14:04 +0000

Unfortunately, I have had to disable registrations on my site too and added a note that if they want to register they have to email instead, to the point that I’ve also neglected adding any updates on it.

I might try that little nifty trick from Michael and might actually use the hack suggested in this article.

By: Michael Lovelock

Michael Lovelock — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:53:57 +0000

For those disabling self registration – don’t, that’s just letting the spammers win!
Splogs are a pain, but if you’re getting enough to really bother you, you might want to consider the ‘Moderate New Blogs’ plugin – http://wpmudev.org/project/Moderate-New-Blogs – at least then real users can still sign up and get their blog, whilst you can get rid of the splogs before they’re ever viewed.

Also worth renaming your wp-signup.php file and you might want to consider some smaller tweaks like removing the ‘powered by wordpress’ test in the footer of your theme. Little stuff, but every little helps