WordPress 2.5 and link spam
Yesterday, I upgraded to the much improved WordPress release 2.5. There are so many improvements that I won’t even start to talk about them. You better watch this 4 minute screencast instead.
But something else happened as well: link spams started to flow in by tens per hour, while this normally was at a stable, low rate of about one a week. I think this is pure coincidence, some spammers having found a new way to massively abuse wordpress blogs. But nevertheless, it;s very annoying.
Luckily, there’s a pretty solid solution around the corner: the plugin Bad Behavior seems to catch this kind of spam very effectivel, at least for now. Let’s see how long this will stand in the spammers’ arms race.
Some links from my little research on blog spam:
- I’m Winning the Battle Against Comment Spam is already over two years old but still valuable
- What’s the best spam filter for Word Press? opinions on LinkedIn answers
- OpenID and Spam slightly unrelated but interesting discussion whether requiring OpenID is a valid strategy for preventing abusive account creation (the so called Splogs).
The OpenID post learned me about the term Club Solution (Club vs. Lojack solutions, Mark Pilgrim). Nice!
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Tags: linkspam, Mark Pilgrim, pretty solid solution, spam, wordpress
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Lorelle said,
April 3, 2008 @ 15:12
You are not alone and it has nothing to do with WordPress 2.5 as some of my blogs not upgraded, including WordPress.com, were slammed over the last couple of days. It’s a new comment spammer on the loose. Since their information is not in the Akismet database yet, it’s up to us in the community of Akismet users to help each other and mark all of these comment spam so the information will get into that database.
New comment spammers get through because they have changed how they work and it’s up to us to teach Akismet to recognize them. There will always be new monsters lurking in the corner spending way too much time trying to waste our time. The fact that it happened a few days after the release of WordPress 2.5 is just a coincidence.
Just start marking them and we all win!
Joe said,
April 3, 2008 @ 15:21
@Lorelle: I already thought that the upgrade to 2.5 was sheer coincidence, so I’m glad that this is not the cause.
The Bad Behavior plugin does block the new spammer pretty effectively (not a single one went through last 24 hours), but I feel almost guilty not being able to mark these comments as spam anymore.
Be sure I contributed my deal already by getting rid of some 50 of them through akismet before!