Riddle me this
So over at Beyond the Job, the professional development blog I co-maintain with Sarah Johnson, we have comments completely turned off. Yet, somehow it’s collecting huge amounts of comment spam per day. Any Wordpress gurus want to venture a guess as to what’s up and how they’re managing to do that?
On a related note, I’m using Spam Karma over here, have been very pleased, but see it’s not going to be updated for much longer. Recommendations for an alternative?
Steve Lawson:
They are probably bypassing your (nonexistent) comments form, and instead hitting the WP comments system directly. From the info on the Codex, it looks like you should be able to delete the wp-comments-post.php and wp-trackback.php files from your installation and stop the spam. Please note that I have not actually ever done this, and can’t promise that it (a) will work or (b) won’t mess anything else up. Here is the URL for the Codex page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam/FAQ#I_have_disabled_comments.2C_but_comments_continue_to_be_posted
As for fighting spam, Akismet + checking the box for “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” under Options : Discussion : Before a comment appears, means that spam almost never gets published on my blog. I still have to clean out the stables behind the scenes, though. Hope that helps.
26 March 2008, 8:03 amrachel:
Thanks! I renamed those files w/ a .bak extension and will see how that goes — the blog seems un-messed-up, at least. Will play with Akismet as well, but I’d prefer something more like Spam Karma that helps reduce the need to clean out behind the scenes.
30 March 2008, 7:59 pm