I was using rel="nofollow” well before this release. I tried to work out a way to add rel="nofollow” to links only for comments made by unregistered users but had them by default on all links until then.

I’m glad to see rel="nofollow” implimented by default in b2evolution. I’m also glad to hear that some options for customization will be added.

So with rel=nofollow in comments, no public stats, and trackbacks off by default: Do we still need anti-spam keywords?

I have removed all keywords from the database, and I have not had problems. Oh sure, the referral spams are still coming in, but they have no effect.

Some spammers will still spam blindly, even with rel="nofollow", so, yes, we can still use a little help from keywords to automatically discard that kind of junk.

I agree with keeping a keyword list. Spammers DON’T stop just because the page they are spamming is (a) not displaying the fruits of the efforts and (b) not even available to view and © not giving them any ‘google juice’ if it was visible. I have been using a hack that gives them a “page gone” response but they don’t care! Once you’re in their program they have no reason to remove you. As part of working up hacks for this software sometimes I empty my antispam table. EVERY time I’ve done it I’ve gotten a flood of spam from domains that have long been a part of the blacklist. They Just Don’t Care.

I am also very glad to see that no google-juice comes from commenting. I don’t get many comments, but I don’t want comments from people who may be motivated by page-rank stuff. Comment because you want to - not because it’ll make you look better! After all, it’s people - not search engines - that make me want to have a web in the first place.

Small note: Francois I think I’ll take a shot at a “juice this commenter” hack, just because I can ;)

About 30% of my site connections are made by referrer spammers. This is for those I catch and I redirect to a “don’t spam this site” page. They don’t care they never appear on my referrers (I count only once each IP and block open proxies). What removed some referrer spammers has been to remove the “disp=stats” feature, but then, I’ve seen appearing spammers on other pages of my blogs.

The rel="nofollow” feature won’t change spamming a lot. However, spammers will maybe understand b2evolution fight spam and efficiently spamming b2evolution powered blogs is going to become more difficult. And that’s a very good point!

Any fix, even if some users say it is but a small one, is appreciated when it comes to reducing the spamming.

So I offer my thanks.

I like the spam prevention of b2evolution! Thumbs up and thank you!

Hokey

Right, I’ve had just about enough of these spammers! They are driving me batty!

I have made it so that by default, all comments have comment_status ‘draft’.

I was then wondering why new comments still showed up even though saved as draft within the DB.

Either I couldn’t find the correct way to hide these posts, or there isn’t one.

So I wrote one.

It seems that I needed a new function.. copy these steps if having comments hidden by default interests you.

1 - Inside b2evocore/_functions_bposts.php I created a function comment_statuses_where_clause which is pretty much exactly the same as statuses_where_clause() but with the SQL references to post_status changed to comment_status

2 - inside b2evocore/_class_commentlist.php, right under
$this->request .= ' AND '.statuses_where_clause( $show_statuses );
I put this line of code
$this->request .= ' AND '.comment_statuses_where_clause( $show_statuses );

3. inside htsrv/comment_post.php, in the SQL that adds the comment to the database, I’ve added a field so the SQL looks like this:


$query = "INSERT INTO $tablecomments( comment_post_ID, comment_type, comment_author_ID, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url, comment_author_IP, comment_date, comment_content, comment_status)
VALUES( $comment_post_ID, 'comment', ".$DB->null($author_ID).",
".$DB->quote($author).", ".$DB->quote($email).",
".$DB->quote($url).",'".$DB->escape($user_ip)."','$now',
'".$DB->escape($comment)."', 'draft' )";

$DB->query( $query );


4. That’s it! The spam no longer appears anywhere on the site! The spammer has no chance of publishing and soon gives up.

5. But we still have to manually approve posts that we want, rather than the other way around. That’s no big drama either. We are now in a position where we approve the comments that we want, rather than delete the spam we don’t want. It’s much more relaxing… This can be done in the admin section. I’ll post instructions on how to do that shortly.

Do the site admins want me to write this up a bit more properly or become an active committer?

Spam me - aha - you can’t!

http://paganarchy.net/blogs/sean.php

all the best,

Sean
(paganarchy blogs)

i got no idea how the nofollow thing work as i still get spams in referer. my account was suspended by my agent as my previous 9.0.12 version was flooded by spam referers and overloaded his server. just had the 9.1 installed yesterday and i already recieved many spams. is it going to kill my agent’s server load again? i dun wanna my account suspend again and reinstall everything.

was wondering the blacklist domains could ban a wildcard like *.ru and similar? might be better if its implemented.

Our b2evo blog-powered site

Francois,

This seems like a very good approach and thank you for taking the time to explain. An informed user-base helps everyone.

Your work is much appreciated.

Yes, rel=nofollow works, also you can use rel="external".
As I know these are the same.Huh?

Hello,

When I click the link from my blog (I can’t publish it here, because the URL is not allowed) to this site appears this information:

403 Forbidden
Please stop referer spam.

[…]

I can assure you that I’m not a spammer or something like that.

Greetings from Germany,
Daniel

Has anyone come up with a way to alert blogspot to the alarming amount of spam they now generate indirectly? Would they even care? It is so easy to get a blogspot subdomain, and it’s an issue I am sure you all deal with as well. I guess this is just my rant more than anything, but it would still be nice to see less blogspot spam comments/trackbacks.

I’ve had a blogger ask if it’s not possible to have people do random text recognition before allowing comments to be added. Does this exist, and if not can we build it in? There must be open source code for this some where that can be used.

I like the spam prevention of b2evolution! Thumbs up and thank you!

Wise

You might want to check out what Andy Beard has to say about using the ‘nofollow’ tags.

http://andybeard.eu/?s=dofollow&searchsubmit=Find

I am planning to disable it if I can figure out HOW.

I am literally fed up of spam comments i don’t know how to get rid the spam comments, i get almost ten to fifteen comments a day out which 70% comments are spam.

Are you using the latest version of b2evolution?
Did you turn off trackback?
Is your antispam blacklist up to date?

You are right, howver nofollo rarely works, you will still get spam.