Spam

As you may have noticed when trying to update MT-Blacklist from the Spam-X plugin recently, the blacklist hasn't been updated in a while and has now even started to throw error messages. The reason is that Jay Allen has discontinued MT-Blacklist.

We would like to thank Jay for his work on MT-Blacklist and hope that his assessment that MT-Blacklist is no longer needed proves to be correct.

As a temporary measure, the last complete MT-Blacklist is available here on geeklog.net. So if you set up a new Geeklog site, open up the Spam-X config.php file (/path/to/geeklog/plugins/spamx/config.php) and update the URL for the initial import to read:

// Entire MT-Blacklist (for inital import)
$_SPX_CONF['mtblacklist_url'] = 'http://www.geeklog.net/backend/blacklist.txt';

Please note that there will be no updates, so if you already did the initial import, clicking on "Update MT-Blacklist" won't do anything (other than throwing an error message ...).

We will be looking into providing other means of spam protection for Geeklog in future releases. In the meantime, the last version of MT-Blacklist should provide some sort of protection for the time being. We suggest that you check your site for new comments / posts on a regular basis and feed your personal blacklist with any URLs and keywords of spam that you may encounter.

And if you haven't already done so, upgrade to Spam-X 1.0.2, which includes some new spam filtering modules.

The Spam-X plugin 1.0.2 is now available for download. This release fixes a few bugs, includes new modules and also implements the necessary name change.

• Fixed MassDelete module
• New module to filter spam posts by IP address
• New module to filter spam posts by the IP address of the spamvertized domain
• New module to filter spam posts by characteristics of the HTTP header

The tarball also includes an updated submit.php which now filters story, link, and event submissions for spam.

This release is compatible with Geeklog 1.3.10, 1.3.11, and 1.3.11sr1. If you're running the current CVS version (1.3.12cvs), please do not install this plugin but continue to use the CVS version.

Hi, this is just a short note about referrer spam and the problem I've had with it and the Visitor Stats plugin by Tom Willet and John Huges, I believe... My site, www.justrage.com gets loads and loads of referrer spam for some obscure reason, and I've always had a hard time doing htaccess magic. So here's what I do and it works for me.

Assuming, of course, you have the Visitor Stats plugin, go to your /plugins/stats directory, open functions.inc and find the following line:

if ($host == 'geeklog.sourceforge.net') {
  $host = 'geeklog.sf.net';
}

And then add the following new line under it:

if (ereg("word", $host)) {
  $host = '';
}
// the '' are single quotes, not a double quote

Change "word" to a specific string in the referring URL you want to block. For instance if you want to block http://something.ne.com you chould change "word" to "something" or "ne" or "com" or even "ne.com". What happens is that the code will simply rub out ALL the referring urls that contain "word" anywhere in it. It will only rub out the URL from the Stats phpblock, though, not the stats pages themselves. Which works fine for me anyway.

Add as many lines under it for as many "words" you need to block.

To my knowledge and experience, SpamX only blocks comment spam, and htaccess is just too complicated for me. So this is what I simply do to resolve my referrer spam issues. Hopefully, in the future someone could update the Stats plugin to include an easy way of doing it from its admin frontend.