5 Quick and Easy Ways To Stop Blog Spam Before It Hits Your Blog

Unless your Lisa Picarille from Revenue Magazine ( check the trackbacks on this whoper )you know that you would have to be a idiot to automatically approve all comments and trackbacks on your blog right? Well Even that is a pain in the ass so I made a list of ways to stop the spam before it gets that far. I have come up with the 5 easiest and best ways to fight comment spam. These are ways to stop spam from ever getting to your blog.... btw if you dont know what akismet is then stop right now and set that up first. This is just to help you stop the spam from even getting the that level. The first 2 require editing of the .htaccess. The rest are wordpress plugins.
5) Deny Access to No Referrer Requests When humans comment on your blog they have read the post and leave a comment. This of course leaves the referal from your blog. One easy way to block spammers is to check for the referal. Simply paste the lines below into your .htaccess file in the root of your webserver.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$

What you need to edit: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php* - If you are not running a wordpress blog then you will want to change that to the file that gets the post for comments. RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*shoemoney.com.* - obviously you want this to be your domain. RewriteRule (.*) ^http://whereyouwanttosendthem.com/$ - this is where you are redirecting them too. This probably does not matter since the automated spambots will not follow redirects. Done! 4) Kill tor anonymous proxies Thats cool people want to surf anonymously and all that but being that about 75% of my comments come from tor proxies its much easier just to block them. simply go here and copy this to your .htaccess to block all the tor servers 3) Stop Comments On Older Posts Spammers target older posts for 2 reasons. A) they show up in search engines and thus they know:

search engines value the page pr wise
it could be relavent to the keyword they are trying to spam

B) You wont see it. - since the post is old its unlikely that you would ever notice thus greater chance of sneaking it by you. You have a few options to fix this- You can manually disallow comments for posts after x amount of days (ick) If you have wordpress you can download this plugin which will automatically close off comments and trackbacks after 21 days. If you have some h4x0r skills you can setup a cron job (thats a automated task to us ninjas) that will edit your database directly checking for past posts and setting the comments and 2) Blacklist Repeat Offenders: When some spammers do get in you can blacklist there ips so they wont ever be able to again... this process does suck a bit but its a option. Again edit your .htaccess file: order allow,deny deny from 192.168.1.1 deny from 192.168.1.* allow from all Remember * represent wildcards 1) Rename your comment file The default for wordpress is wp-comments-post.php by simply renaming this file to say... wpc.php then changing your theme to reflect the different location for the comment file you will ward off a TON of spammers. This will kill 100% of the automated spam bots. Your probably saying to yourself... well so what? How could this effect my revenue! Well the answer is all the hardwork and time you have spent building the reputation of your site can be QUICKLY destroyed by giving these spammers NAKID (no link condom) links. You know what they say... Imagine everyone you link to and who they have linked to and who they have linked to .... eek! A good resource I like to read from time to time is SpamHuntress