Strangely Perfect

WordPress User Registration Spam Last year I told how I tackled various sorts of spam hitting the website, in particular, in this post, User Registration Spam.  Even now, my main defence is SABRE, although I don’t use all the options.  This gives me the combination of flexibility, security and openness I require on this website.  [...]

Just for a while I’ve closed down the open comments access a bit (but not completely) until the splurge of spam has passed that started last night.  For some reason, Akismet etc missed a lot.  Hopefully, it’ll be back to it’s normal trappy self soon. My sites went slow with all the hits, but as [...]

Well it’s hard to say, actually.  I run this site on WordPress which dynamically uses a backend database and various plugins.  The thing is that I chop and change the various blocking systems for testing, failures, experiments and even because I like the name!  There a host of reasons. But my website has had millions [...]

….That’s what I’ve determined empirically recently.  Matt’s (WordPress prime mover) post here and this article in the Guardian mention the various failings of CAPTCHA. It’s the kind of thing that’s dawned on me progressively and is the reason I don’t use Captcha any more.  I’ve tested it and in the WordPress plugins that use it, [...]

Revising the htaccess IP address block list in light of the results from recent experiments to find the current bad source addresses for registration and comment spam

I’ve had quite a few search enquiries and hits for komatoz.net on my sites recently so there are obviously a lot of people suffering out there with spamming and registration problems that I’ve “currently” ;-) got under control. (We all know that this is a continuous battle against spammers as their approaches and techniques change [...]

It’s all in the title really! However, the point of this post is that I have a few domains and it looks like the robot(s) are set up by alphabetical order, not IP order. Here’s how: Two weeks ago and previous, Domain A had loads of spam, Domain B had few Now, Domain A has [...]

Thanks Didier! Sabre appears to work! This screenshot shows two registration bot attacks on my Crawling Chaos site from Russia. This plugin just saves so much time. I just have to check occasionally to make sure I’m not blocking someone genuine. If you can’t read the details, here they are copied and pasted: onewNeemFiews email [...]

I’ve installed a plugin to attempt to block the registration spam I get. Most of it comes from Russia (mail.ru, yandex.ru, say). It’s not doing damage as I have everyone locked down to subscriber level initially – it’s more a pain to check and delete periodically. First I’ll check the username and email address strings [...]