spam?

[Simone Bettini]

We had the very same problem on some of the manila blogs we are hosting 
on our servers.

I tried at first to prevent the spamming changing the form in the 
manila function that generates and processes it, hoping that the 
spambot did simply a post without previously loading the form, but 
unfortunately it was able to prevent any of the strategies I tried.

I suppose such spam is generated from a script that drives a real 
browser filling in the form and submitting it, so looks like any client 
side strategy is defeated.

The solution I found was to install a filter on the code that receives 
the comment and checks if the body contains some keywords and strings 
from a list I keep up to date, and in such a case it simply doesn't 
save the comment.

Since then I was able to prevent further spamming just keeping the 
banned strings up to date. This approach may fail as soon as the 
spammers will realize and start s.c.r.ambling words, but as liks to 
sites can't be changed they can anyway be used to stop the comments.

Hopefully the introduction of the nofollow property with the recent 
manila update will make many of them desist as part of the benefit 
derived from spamming ceases.

Unfortunately I had to change one of manila functions to achieve the 
result and it is possible that further updates will overwrite it, so I 
am keeping a copy of it apart to be able to restore the spam filtering 
code, unless userland guys will come out with a similar or better 
solution.

Would you want to try installing my modified code just let me know and 
I will clean up it a bit and let you have it. Keep in mind that it will 
come with no guarantee and you will have to go and edit manually the 
stopwords table as it lacks any user interface.

Simone

  Il giorno 11/feb/05, alle 12:55, Paul Hampel ha scritto:

> My blog has been getting spammed from an online poker/gambling site 
> and an online drug company. Can you give me any ideas on how to stop 
> this? I've been deleting their memberships and messages, but they come 
> back in a few hours with even more stuff.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Paul Hampel , Technology Coordinator
> George Washington High School
> 215-961-2001
> http://blog.gwhs.phila.k12.pa.us/
>