Fighting Spam

There are basically two types of Spammers you will need to deal with:

  • Comment spammers who will plague your site with irrelevant comments, frequently linking to sites selling pills, shoes, "get rich quick" schemes, and what not…
  • Crawlers who put your site under heavy stress as they request hundreds of pages per minute, either because they are scraping your content, or because they are trying to find comment forms to spam, or even because they are looking for security vulnerabilities to exploit later…

This section explains how to mitigate these nuisances.

  • Introduction to Fighting Spam (AntiSpam)

    Comment spam is a plague on all blogs, forums and generally all websites that allow user generated content. Why is that? Spammers are actually professionals hired to do just that! What they try to achieve is to place a link to their own website (or th…More »

  • Recognizing a crawler attack

    When you look at your b2evolution's Analytics Tab, you may see a huge increase of traffic like this:More »

  • My blog is slow because it's hammered with comment SPAM! How do I recover?

    If your blog is being hammered with comment spam, it will get slower and slower as your database gets bloated with hundreds of thousands of spammy comments. At some point your site will get so slow and will consume so many resources that your web hosti…More »

  • Creating an Antispam Plugin

    An ‘'’Antispam Plugin”’ is a plugin that implements methods to prevent/fight back at spam. Creating an ‘'’Antispam Plugin”’ is the same as [[CreatingPlugin|creating a "normal" plugin]]. This pag…More »

  • Confusing SPAMbots by changing your file structure

    A few antispam techniques : b2evo comes with a blacklist. Update that frequently. (This is found in admin/antispam/request abuse update). Change the directory/folder name for your trackback and comments from <em>htsrv</em> to any other val…More »

  • How to control referrer spam hits from search engines

    This refers to b2evolution versions 0.9.0.* Are you getting traffic from search engines for something that a referer spammer faked into your stats page? Would you like to keep your referer data and stats page visible to visitors but stop the undesira…More »

  • Antispam Tips

    Are you getting traffic from search engines for something that a referer spammer faked into your stats page? Would you like to keep your referer data and stats page visible to visitors but stop the undesirable traffic? If so this is the place for you.…More »

  • Fighting SPAM with .htaccess

    Keeping the spammers at bay with a hardened .htaccess should be your first line of defense with any web site. So let’s get started! Restricting Where Comments Originate From Everyone likes comments, but no-one wants comment spam. The simple…More »

  • Delete User Data

    User moderators have rights to delete those users data which they can edit, even if they don’t have specific permission to delete those data.More »

  • Places where automatic blocks may occur (Antispam)

    The following scripts implement blocks requests and verifications for according the actions they perform and following htsrv/comment_post.php htsrv/item_edit.php htsrv/login.php activateaccount validatemail htsrv/message_send.php…More »

  • I can't post "spam" to my own site!

    If you feel b2evolution detects spam or security issues too often in what you posts to your own site and you don’t want to hear about it any more, you can disable all the SPAM and Security checks on the Administrators account. See: Blogging…More »

  • Blocking actions from spammers

    A spammer may be blocked because b2evolution detects a request coming from a blocked domain, a blocked IP address or a blocked country. In such a case the following actions will be blocked: Add / Manage items Add / Manage comments, trackbacks or…More »

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