Make Money from Blogs » Spam

WordPress security tips (part 6) – Plugins to secure your blog

ashish — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:08:37 +0000

As a continuation of the series of posts that would help in securing your WordPress blog, here is a link to 2 more plugins that either help to control registrations done by Bots, or have small incremental steps that make WordPress more secure (by changing the amount of information that is exposed through the workflows, removing directory browsing, and other similar measures). Here are these 2 plugins:

Sabre – Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine.
This plugin helps in restricting the ability of spam registrations on your blog, when you have allowed visitors to register on your site. Read more on this link.

List of available features:
Inclusion of a captcha in the registration form
Selection of the captcha’s complexity
Selection of the background colour for the captcha image
Inclusion of a math test in the registration form
Selection of the math test’s complexity
Random or fixed choice of the test to run .. (and more)

Secure WordPress
This plugin does small incremental steps that go towards making WordPress more secure. Read more about this plugin at this link.

- removes error-information on login-page
- adds index.html to plugin-directory (virtual)
- removes the wp-version, except in admin-area
- removes Really Simple Discovery
- removes Windows Live Writer

And the site has more information

Keep your blog safe – clean your comments of spam and junk comments

ashish — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:43:10 +0000

What does this mean ? Keeping your blog safe by removing junk comments ? Well, I have yet to find anybody who likes spam comments or junk comments on their blog. These comments could be in the nature of normal sounding comments (except that they will also have a promotion link to a website (and these cause the biggest problem since they seem to be legitimate comments), or comments that are not related to your post (and contain one or more links), or they could be outright junk that peddles all kind of products such as Viagra / Drugs free of prescriptions / Sell sexual products, etc.
There are people who don’t tolerate such comments on their blogs and use all sorts of spam-prevention methods, and there are others who let such matters go. So, if you have an account on Blogger, the default condition is to let people add comments to your blog, without your finding out about new comments unless you monitor your posts. One way to avoid this is to add a higher level of control, either by adding a Captcha in the comments page, or by restricting comments to those who have an OpenID.
Why should you remove such junk comments ? If you have such junk comments on your blog, there are problems:
- People who visit your blog are likely to be put off by such comments and you lose readers
- People will be less eager to forward the contents of your blog to other people
- Search engines are not comfortable with such content, and if such content is found on your blog, then your blog itself may get penalized
It does not take much time to setup a process of comment moderation, captcha, and other such methods of reducing comment spam, and deleting the ones that get through.

WordPress Plugin: Using bad behaviour plugin to stop spam

ashish — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:16:38 +0000

As your blog becomes popular, one problem that seems to cause a lot of concern is comment spam. You must have seen them, comments with long lists of URL’s that advertise items that you would rather do not appear on your blog, or medicines that you are not interested in buying, or other similar comments that have no relation to your blog. What do you do ? You search for some way to stop these spam. Akismet is one option, but even with Akismet, you get a lot of spam that needs to be cleared out regularly. Once I missed out clearing the comment spam from Akismet for several weeks, and when the auto-cleaning for Akismet happened with around 20,000 such spam comments, it created a performance hit on my shared server (and the steps I had to take after that are not something you want to repeat on your own blog – I had to get my account re-activated).
Read (and download) the plugin at this location (link)
Bad Behavior prevents the spam from even making its way onto your server or blog, thus ensuring that you do not have to fish among all the comments filtered by Akismet to search for genuine comments. From the site:

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
Bad Behavior also transcends other link spam solutions by working in a completely different, unique way. Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behavior can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.

WordPress anti-spam plugin: Use Spam Karma

ashish — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:47:11 +0000

Dealing with spam can be quite a pain for owners of WordPress blogs. If you have an active blog, sooner or later you will have to start dealing with the fact that there are various ways to generate spam, and you have to deal with this spam. Soon, you will end up with so much spam that you will not be able to find genuine comments. However, there are ways around this. WordPress comes with a default plugin called ‘Akismet’ that needs to be activated in order to block Spam. Akismet needs a user to have an account on WordPress.com in order to be activated.
However, there are users who sometimes find that Akismet generates false positives (cases where a comment is mistakenly flagged as spam). False positives are the hardest to track, since these can get lost among the spam, and if you have a large number of spam, then you will lose valid comments. So, if you are looking for an alternative for using Akismet, then another plugin that is pretty famous is called ‘Spam Karma 2′ (link to download page). From the site:

Spam Karma is a modular system for detecting and blocking comment spam. It works through the use of various plugins that each test a comment for a particular aspect of “spamminess”. Each of these tests assigns points to the comment, and after all the tests are run they are totaled up. if the overall points are negative, it’s considered spam and blocked.
There are a lot of options for how you want the system to interpret the points and so forth. You can set the relative strength of each test individually, making some tests more important than others. There are third-party plugins available as well, which add functionality beyond that of Spam Karma alone.

FAQ is available at this link.

AntiLeech WordPress Plugin: How to protect your RSS feed from getting copied automatically

ashish — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:44:26 +0000

For bloggers, a RSS feed is something critically important. With a RSS feed, you can build a set of dedicated readers who get pinged everytime you generate new content, as well as be able to control how much of your post you want them to see. If users are impressed with what they read, they will come to your blog more often to read other content on the blog, and spread the word around. So, having a RSS feed is critical. At the same time, a RSS feed is also a very useful tool in the hands of somebody who wants to make a simple automated system of copying your feed. Such a person will have a website build of content from many similar blogs, and automatically generate content from these different feeds. And since Google does not index RSS feeds, this other site will use a mechanism to take this feed and create a post on the other site. Of course, you hate this, but what can you do, short of stopping your RSS feed. Or you can take the effort to try and identify this person from your RSS feed and block, but it is no easy matter.
Another option is to use a WordPress Plugin to try and give a different content to such an automated system (called a splog, a blog build from feed spammers who automatically take content from feeds and convert them into content on another blog, hence stealing your content). One way to reduce or prevent such stealing is through using a WordPress Plugin called AntiLeech WordPress Plugin (site). What does this Plugin do ?
From the site:

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.
AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content.

Read more about this plugin from other blogs at Google Search (link)