All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I’m not sure what’s going on, but a lot comment spam from 71.57.133.162 is getting through. Bad Behavior 1.2.2 is filtering everything but that one, it seems. (Yes, I did check the logs for activity.) I emailed Mike two days ago, but haven’t gotten a reply yet. For now, I’ve denied that IP access via .htaccess. Update: I didn’t realize that I wasn’t alone on this. Tom and Anne got hit, too.

Michael Heilemann has written “How to Stop Spam on WordPress” on Binary Bonsai. He’s sick of being locked out of commenting on other blogs, and I can’t blame him.

Unlike him, I’ve been getting gibberish spam (they literally don’t make sense), including one today on a post that was 9 days old. In reply to his post, I think he linked to the wrong plugin. I’m not sure what Optional Comment Moderation does, but I do know that Auto Moderate Coments does allow you to moderate old posts after user-defined period of time (it’s very simple to change, mine is set to 10 days). Plus, the plugin developer explained its functionality very well.

I agree with Michael’s comments, especially that it’ll take some work to weed through the moderation queue. But, your visitors can interact with you with basically no additional work on their part, and you can hopefully develop a more stable readership. I’m still not using any spam plugins, just Auto Moderate Comments, and a good comment moderation word list.

After such a long time, I finally got hit last night with 31 comment spams. Of course, I have WordPress set so that “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” before a comment appears. Everything was spam, so just two clicks and all were marked spam and moved from moderation.

Two innocent-looking comments went through.

Thank you for great web site, i have discovered it recently, lots of good read

I came to your site accidentially, but found it very good to read. Thanks.

• Both came from the same IP address: 198.177.252.9
• Both had different email addresses
• Both had different URLs that went to almost identical looking websites (varying only in content - layout completely the same)

What will I do with this? I marked those comments as spam, and simply banned the IP address. Anybody else starting to see a small trickle of this? I’m not sure what to think.

I’ve opened up comments site-wide. They will not be closed after a certain period of time any longer, merely moderated after two weeks, thanks to Auto Moderate Comments. Hopefully, I’ll just close comments on a post-to-post basis from this moment on.

With Referrer Karma and MacManX’s nice word moderation list, I haven’t been getting spam. Should I disable Auto Shutoff Comments and edit the comment status for all posts to “Open” thru phpMyAdmin? Why am I writing this? I just made a comment in a post that was made in the beginning of February about Skype. Who knows if someone else wants to do the same here?