Fighting the War Against Web Site Spam Bots

The last days I have been fighting in the war against the latest spam bot soldiers like a maniac.

I own and manage over 70 web sites. This includes different forums, directories, blogs, topsites, article submission sites and you name it.

Very recently there is a new wave of spam. The default captcha for vBulletin is now not working against spam bots, also not the submission rules for the PHP Link Directory.

After winning a few combats I can now finally rest, a little.

Here are some weapons I used to fight this spam war:

PHP Link Directory version 3 or above

Follow these instructions to stop getting spam:
http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46424&postcount=13

Follow these instructions to delete if you got massive amount of spam:
http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46308&postcount=1

vBulletin version 3.5 and up

Follow these instructions exactly:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1193538&postcount=28

vBulletin version 3.6 and up

Install this Enhanced Captcha Image Verification:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=132482

WordPress

Install the following plugins:

If you know how to do PHP programming I recommend you to completely disable and erase trackbacks (but not pingbacks). I did that but I am afraid I don’t remember how I did.

Aardvark Topsites PHP

See this post:
http://www.jimwestergren.com/stop-the-topsites-spam/

This article is going to be regularly updated with the latest weapons in this war, feel welcome to bookmark it.

21 responses » Leave a comment
  1. Esteban Panzera said on December 9, 2006 at 5:27 am

    Thanks a lot for this Jim, reading now how to stop spam in my phpld directory :)

  2. agaton said on December 9, 2006 at 8:47 pm

    I get 100:eds of spamcomments last two days.. Akismet is synonym with love sometimes.

    The sad thing in the whole aspect is that I got an email everytime something has been stopped by Akismet :(.. So 200 new mail yesterday was not so funny.. Must fix it now.

  3. raj4encoders said on December 10, 2006 at 7:32 am

    Wow! Jim, you ‘ve really done a great job. Fixing it now in our directory. Thanks from encoders.
    raj
    encoders

  4. Netfreez said on December 20, 2006 at 6:58 pm

    Didn’t visit your blog in a while but I see you added the spam protection to the posts, I’ve been utilizing it on Email Forms for a while and it does cut-down / eliminate a great number of spam.

    Akismet is a great tool for wordpress, it’s unlike any other.

  5. Zohaib said on December 21, 2006 at 7:35 am

    Thank you Jim for providing us a way to stop spam bots.

  6. Mr Apache said on March 15, 2007 at 5:15 am

    Nice one, I changed my urls to wpcco.php and I am seeing intelligent spambots that issue a GET request for my blog page, then find the changed url by looking at the source! then they issue a POST full of spam to my renamed file! ahh.

    http://www.askapache.com/2007/htaccess/fight-blog-spam-with-apache.html

  7. Selcen said on June 9, 2007 at 7:21 pm

    Wow! Jim, you ‘ve really done a great job

  8. Kamil said on July 2, 2007 at 7:35 pm

    I get 100:eds of spamcomments last two days.. Akismet is synonym with love sometimes.

  9. Felsefe said on July 17, 2007 at 11:02 pm

    that’s awesome!
    thank you so much :)

  10. pankaj said on July 22, 2007 at 3:26 pm

    spam karma 2 is great - it will help a lot. have arnd 500 spams daily - hope to get rid of this now. thanxs

  11. Top Directories said on July 31, 2007 at 10:08 pm

    Very good site. Good luck!

  12. linkdir said on July 31, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    Thanks man, just what I was looking for. Worked like a charm Thanks so much…

  13. Lizunoff said on December 13, 2007 at 8:50 pm

    Hey! Make nofollow and no problem with spam!

  14. seo yarismasi said on December 16, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    Thank you Jim for providing us a way to stop spam bots.

  15. Chat said on January 1, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    Thanks man, just what I was looking for. Worked like a charm Thanks so much…

  16. SEO-WATCH said on February 16, 2008 at 8:41 am

    How about the old version of PHPld can I block the spam bots there…?

  17. muhabbet said on February 25, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    I get 100:eds of spamcomments last two days.. Akismet is synonym with love sometimes.

  18. islami sohbet said on March 8, 2008 at 12:18 am

    I get 100:eds of spamcomments last two days.. Akismet is synonym with love sometimes.

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  1. […] This phpld fix is brought you by Jim Westergren. Original post of spam bot phpld fix. Thread on PHP Link Directory forum thread for spam bot submissions. […]

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  3. […] Oh, by the way, if your site (directory, forum or blog) gets attacked by some sort of stupid robot spam, you should head down to Jim Westergren’s site and read up on how to combat those monsters (Fighting The War Against Web Site Spam Bots). They have solutions for Wordpress, vBulletin, Phplinkdirectory and Aardvark Topsites Php. Ha, one of my directories got spammed by the thousands per week. No, I am not kidding. I can get about a thousand over submissions and all are crap from forums and what not. Me hate Spam bots. […]

    Pingback by AUTHO-RITY Blog » Blog Archive » Looking for Singapore Spas? + Fight Against Website Spam — April 22, 2007 @ 9:40 am



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