{"id":279,"date":"2008-05-09T15:37:13","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T20:37:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2008\/protecting-against-blog-comment-spam\/"},"modified":"2008-05-09T15:44:12","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T20:44:12","slug":"protecting-against-blog-comment-spam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2008\/protecting-against-blog-comment-spam\/","title":{"rendered":"Protecting against blog comment spam."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi,<\/p>\n<p>First things first: thank you for Akismet!<\/p>\n<p><img src='https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/picture-2.png' alt='wordpress screenshot'  style=\"float: right; margin: 15px\"\/><\/p>\n<p>&#8230; I just wanted to offer my sincere appreciation for the WordPress anti-spam plugin: &#8216;Askimet&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>This nifty plugin has saved me countless hours (and possibly days) of work by filtering out hundreds of spam post each and every day! <\/p>\n<p>I can easily say that for me, Askimet has proven to be the most important plugin for WordPress.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Just in the time it took me to write this post, Askimet has caught 7 spam comments!<\/p>\n<p><strong>If you see a spammer, smack him!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It is clear that blog spammers are among the worst of Web citizens. They are the hyena&#8217;s of the Web, trying to steal traffic they don&#8217;t deserve. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Blog spam protection tips<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Being a high value spam target (the juicier the traffic &#8230;), I can offer the following advice:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you are a WordPress user, you should be sure to activate Askimet &#8230; it will save you time. Big time!<\/li>\n<li>By default, keep comments disabled for your post and only enable them manually. And after a little while, shut off the comments.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230; I used to keep my comments on by default. Then one day I got hit with so much spam, that it effectively became a denial of service attack &#8211; my whole server began to grind to a halt.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How comment spam nearly took down my dedicated server<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As you may know, WordPress can be configured to send you an email alert every time someone post a comment. So when I got hit with thousands of spam comments in the span of an hour, my mail server started to flood with email confirmations from WordPress. <\/p>\n<p>This in turn flooded my email in-box with thousands of emails and had the PHP engine working overtime. All this put together .. hogs up a lot of server power. <\/p>\n<p>To fix the problem, I first shut off all comments in WordPress, restarted the web server and then I had to manually flush all the remaining emails from the mail (smtp) server.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, even with Askimet running, I still found myself up to my neck in spam &#8230; because I was a little to relaxed with regards to blog comments.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Final tip<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Even if you are not a WordPress user, you can still use Askimet in your blog or forum &#8211; you just need to know a little PHP to hook into it.<\/p>\n<p>Hey .. yet ANOTHER reason to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.killerphp.com\">learn PHP<\/a>!<\/p>\n<p>Stefan Mischook<\/p>\n<p>www.killersites.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi, First things first: thank you for Akismet! &#8230; I just wanted to offer my sincere appreciation for the WordPress anti-spam plugin: &#8216;Askimet&#8217;. This nifty plugin has saved me countless hours (and possibly days) of work by filtering out hundreds of spam post each and every day! I can easily say that for me, Askimet &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,34],"tags":[37,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}