Unfortunately, scaredpoet.com has apparently reached a strata of popularity that it is now a target of comment spam. Oh, joy.
So far, I’ve begun using comment moderation to try to stifle any future attacks (which folks, is why your comments aren’t showing up immediately after you post them… I’m working on that), and slowly but surely I’m in the process of weeding out spam comments from older posts. However there’s one stupid li’l spammer that I can’t seem to get of. And this spammer hails from lilo@suddenenlightenment.us.
I don’t know what ungodly method s/he/it uses, but this one manages to get past my moderation efforts every time, and it seems to be happening as I’m posting the message, which gives me great concern that there may be a worm or bot of some sort involved that I haven’t been able to track down quite yet. And it appears I’m not the only one with this little problem.
If anyone knows what the hell is going on and how to stop it, please let me know. It’s really starting to piss me off.
Ahh, the pitfalls of popularity on the ‘net.
It started out small at first — just a handful of comments appearing overnight.
Then last night I ended up getting TWO HUNDRED of them from our friend Lilo
(whose IP address changes every time, making it impossible to “block” her.
I’m on MT, but looking to upgrade… the newer versions apparently allow you to
do “mass” deletes, which will be a big help.
Ahhh, yess, that’s exactly why I avoided MT when I chose software. I’m glad comment moderation is built into WordPress.
I’ve been working on getting a hack to work where the site will generate those random numbers in an image that a person will need to type in to verify that they’re not a bot posting spam, but so far, no joy. Hopefully I can get it working before the situation gets really bad.
I’ve had enough of this lilo@suddenenlightenment.us that I’ve had to remove comments from my site. I just deleted 600 comments from her earlier today only to find 200 more five hours later. I just can’t afford to lose the bandwidth…
Jason: There were a couple of things I managed to do to remove the lilo comments. But it requires some skill with mySQL or whatever database your blog is using to store its content.
I got tired of deleting comments manually, and just as I was about to give up and turn comments off myself, I said, ‘wait a minute, theres this massive database lying underneath, with very powerful search capabilities. I don’t need to do this manually!’
So, I logged into the database as an administrator (though that was probably overkill and just search for “lilo@suddenenlightenment.us” And lo and behold, all of the comment entires with that address popped right up. I highlighted all the entries, hit the DEL button, and the comments were all gone from the website.
I visited your blog, but don’t know what blog engine you’re running. I can tell it’s PHP, so it’s probably using MySQL as its database engine. With a little help from whoeever is administrator for your server, you can get direct access to the database and make changes to the entries, like searches and mass comment deletions.
There are a couple of tools that give you direct access to MySQL. The most common is phpMyAdmin, but I found it’s not quick enough for my taste. So, I downloaded and installed MySQL Control Center, instead. It provides a graphical interface, make searches easy, and if you’ve used MS Access, you’ll get the hang of it very quickly. Best of all, it’s a free download.
A word of caution: back up the database before you go tinkering around with it (MySQL Control has instructions for backing up a datbase in the help files). That way you can at least go back to where you were before if something horribly goes wrong with your edit. And ALWAYS ask a knowledgeable person for help (server admins are often good for this) if you don’t know what you’re doing.