PB blog: IT stuff, ogame and various

Texas Holdem Spam

I’m getting trackback spam from the “texas holdem poker” guy since a while now.

Abstract: in this post I’ll explain you how to get rid of comments spam if you are using WordPress for your blog.

First of all, if you get the “texas holdem poker” sh*t, you are probably getting a lot of comments from other “visitors”. Install the Captcha! plugin to get rid of 90% of them. Captcha is a system that generates an image containing random characters: people have to correctly write what they see in the image in order for their comment to be accepted.

You can do as I did: test Captcha! for a few days. You’ll notice that the spam will lowe, but not the texas holdem and the other trackback comments. To block trackback comments you need something more powerful: try the Spam Karma 2 plugin (SK2).

SK2 seems more difficult to configure but you can try to use the default settings, as I am doing. In my General Settings I modified only the following:

• Severity: “Kinda Mean”… and the spam is automatically caught
• Simple Digest - Strength: “Disabled”… as I hate to get e-mails for every spam that I get.

In my Recent Spam Harvest, as I had hundreds of comments i modified the following:

• Purge comments older than: “30 days”.

That’s it. Captcha! will catch 90% of your spam, Spam Karma 2 will get the remaining. Try to play with the SK2 settings if it filters also the genuine comments of your innocent visitors. Good luck.

Edit 3.3.2006: I uninstalled Captcha! because of one single reason, accessibility. I still get a lot of spam, which is detected and removed by Spam Karma. Thus why should I annoy people that want to comment on my blog with Captchas?

spam

sping

texas holdem poker

December 19, 2005, Category: IT stuff

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