Another Wordpress Blog

The news is bad: spammers have learned a work around Akismet. Wendy of Emoms at Home and others have been describing a pesky trick some spammers are using.

Spammers visit the blog, add an innocuous post which gets through Akismet. The blogger reads the comment and permits it to stay on the blog; soon a whole bunch of really icky spam appears and Akismet doesn’t catch it.

Well…so far not on my blogs because I have triple protection: I use BadBehavior, Akismet and I’ve been using Spam Karma for a long time. The interesting thing about SpamKarma 2 is it works well initially, and improves dramatically as the database containing spam words and sites grows.

If you use WordPress, my triple protection should work for you too.

Here are four easy steps for implementing my solution.

Steps:

• Install BadBehavior. This is a first line of defense that keeps many spambots off your blog altogether. It also saves CPU.
• Install SpamKarma 2.3 . This will let you have a decent blacklist for a variety of spam phrases. So, it prevents that blast of spam if you do let in one of those innocuous looking comments.
• Install the Akismet plugin for Spamkarma. This will let you run Spam Karma and Akismet together.
• Activate both plug-ins, click to manage SK2 and add your Akismet code to SK2. (This will create a database and get SK2 started.

You now have SK2, Akismet and Bad Behavior all up and running, you now have loads of protection.

Still, there is something else you’ll may want to do.

Remember I said SK2 improves over time? It does this by adding IPs, and domains to a blacklist. The more complete the blacklist, the better the protection.

I bet a problem has now occurred to you: you just installed SK2; your blacklist is nearly empty!

Guess what? You can fix that by adding all the blacklist entries SpamKarma and I created over time!

To add my blacklist entries, you need to have access to your MySQL databases. You will also need to download the contents of my SK2 blacklist.

So, log on to your hosting account and visit the database for your WordPress blog. You should find a table called “sk2_blacklist’ added there. Check to see that there are only 7 default entries in the table. (If there are more, that means SK2 already added something to the spam list! More importantly, you will get an error when you continue following these instructions — but I can tell you what to do.)

Now, look for an SQL button to permit you to run SQL commands. Copy the contents of my file into a text box for SQL and run the commands. When you finish, you will have added the list of spammers SK2 identified for my site.

Maximum protection, instantly!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 6:54 am and is filed under Blog Hacks, Plugins, Spam, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.