Dealing with comment and trackback spam

Ruby Apps Typo
1

Does anyone have suggestions on how to deal with spam? I’ve been going
through my posts and noticed that there are some with hundreds of
trackbacks or comments. Deleting each one by hand would not be
practical. I could delete a bunch using script/console … I’d prefer a
more automated way of dealing with this, though. For example, is there a
way to moderate these or to delete more than one at a time?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

Jen

2

With 4.0? The feedback tab will let you deal with a whole page at a
time. My usual approach is to search for a spam wordd, select all of
the messages, and then skim through and uncheck anything that isn’t
spam. Then hit ‘delete all’.

Scott

3

jennyw wrote:

Does anyone have suggestions on how to deal with spam?

I use the PostgreSQL command line client and type in a raw SQL command
to zap it :slight_smile:

I did think about writing some command line tools for Typo maintenance,
so you could do

zap --from ‘user@host’

and it would zap comments according to the regex.

mathew

4

It’s very GMail Scott! I like it.

5

I used to do raw SQL, but you can accomplish 95% of the same thing via
the feedback tab. Search for ‘user@host’, click on the select button
in the table header, and then click ‘delete all’.

Scott

6

Thanks for the suggestions for deleting spam!

Are there suggestions for preventing it?

Jen

7

Turn on akismet in the spam settings section.

Scott

8

jennyw wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions for deleting spam!

Are there suggestions for preventing it?

Be ruthless about deleting it. If there’s spam visible on your site, it
will attract more spam. It’s like graffiti.

Block anything with more than a few links/URLs. It’s very rare for a
commenter to need to post more than (say) 3 links, but spammers all seem
to try to post at least half a dozen.

Have typo turn off comments after (say) 30 days. Chances are nobody’s
actively watching any discussion or comment older than that, but old
comments are just as good for spamming.

I have non-AJAX comments turned on, but I haven’t had any spam in a
couple of months.

mathew