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All right they have made me mad. I am creating a plugin to handle comment spam. It will be modular so that you can drop in new features as the comment spammers change. Here are my general specs:

There will be three distinct type of modules.

One type of module will handle detection of spam comments and a second type of module will determine what action(s) are taken after the spam comment is detected. The third type of module will be comment admin help like mass delete of comments based on criteria or review of saved comments. You will be able to pick which modules you use.

The first detection module I will write will use the MT-Blacklist to detect spam comments. The second detection module will use IP banning.

There are several different action modules possible. First will be a module to just reject the comment. This will be followed by modules to notify the admin of the comment, automatically ban the IP of the commenter, save the comment for review, sanitize the comment, etc.

The plugin will be object oriented and the modules will simply be class files dropped in the approiate place. I anticipate no additional tables so install will be easy.

Expect the initial version sometime latter today or tonight.

TomW

Thanks tomw! You and Dirk provide about the best support I have ever seen. It is very much appreciated!

Ok I have the basics of the comment spam plugin working with the MT-Blacklist module. I need a couple of testers who are knowledgeable about Geeklog. There are no install instructions and the admin interface is not working, but comment spam is squashed according to my tests. Drop me an email if you want to test it.

TomW

Tomw I would love to help if I can. You have all helped me get through this mess and I would like to return that.

I am far from an expert but I can try what ever you want. I have 14 Geeklog sites on all different versions. I have 1.3.7, 1.3.8sr4 and 1.3.9sr1.

I may need a little more direction but I am a fast learner.

Thanks Keystone, if no one else is interested I will not bother to polish it up and release it.

TomW

I'm interested in helping, but which versions of geeklog will it support, I believe I'm running the latest version of 1.38 and I know I'm running a few 1.39 as well.

-Rob

No restrictions, it is not using anything that is version specific.

TomW

Version 1.3.9rc1 I get the following message when trying to view logs:

The requested URL /admin/plugins/ban//logview.php was not found on this server.

It gives me a 404 page with that error message.

Can I say how much I like this already?

I posted spam links while logged in and got returned to the front page with no comment posted. Log shows the following:

Fri Jun 4 10:35:55 2004 - Found Spam Comment matching (levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|xenical|adipex|meridiab)[w-_.]*.[a-z]{2,}
Fri Jun 4 10:35:55 2004 - Deleted Spam Comment

This is version 1.3.9rc1 with anon comments still turned off.

Version 1.3.7 has a couple problems.

Had to create the file: spamx.log in the the logs folder.

Installs correctly but when trying to post comments I get the following error:

Warning: Missing argument 8 for savecomment1() in /home/httpd/vhosts/keystonesoldiers.com/httpdocs/comment.php on line 221

Warning: Missing argument 9 for savecomment1() in /home/httpd/vhosts/keystonesoldiers.com/httpdocs/comment.php on line 221

This is for comment.php,v 1.38.4.4 2004/01/23 that has the anonymous comments fix.

I also get the same errors as the other version when trying to access the logs in spamx. Where do I get rid of that extra slash in the URL? I mean what file will I find it in?

edited to add: No comments will post at all on this version. Logged in or logged out it is the same.

keystone

I see now that from version 1.3.8 on there is one less parameter for the savecomment() call. Guess I will have to take that into account.

TomW

Both versions are working fine. I have anonymous comments turned back on for the site that had been hit the hardest last week.

This is the final call for testers. Keystone and Blaine have volunteered to help. If I don't get at least one more tester, I will charge for the plugin when it is finished!

Come on people if you take from the community, you should be willing to give back. I am not asking for coders just people to install and test and provide feedback.

Update: last night the spam filter caught about 100 attempts to post spam comments on my sites. It was interesting to see the progression. The first site hit had about 80 attempts before the spammer gave up, the following two sites had only one attempt for each different comment. It appears that there was a person running the attempt because a script would have just kept trying on all the sites. 3 of the 4 attempts were rejected because of urls I noticed yesterday, the other had a levitra website name and was caught by the normal mt-blacklist. The attacker had 4 ips he/she was rotating through.

TomW

Tom, this looks great. It's installed on my site now and have done some intial testing and it looks good. I like that I can easily just expand the filtered list.

The built in log viewer is great and would make a nice core feature in Geeklog. As a plugin developer, you know how often we tend to use the error.log file for debugging comments - and also forget to remove these calls too ofen

Thanks again - great and timely contribution.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

TomW, if you still haven't found another tester, I'd be happy to take a shot. jmi at dominopower dot de

I like this plugin a lot. My sites have been hit hard with this spam but this seems to be keeping it pretty clean. I have the anonymous comments turned back on and no spam in over 24 hours. The only attempt was 2 posts for some pill seller and it booted them right out.
I agree with Blaine about the log viewer included too. That is a great feature.

15 minutes after posting here - I had about 20 spam post attempts in 2 min from various IP's . All were detected and deleted

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

I would be willing to test the plugin on my sites. I have been getting hit with spam comments for a couple of weeks now. I only get a couple comments a day so it hasn't been a big problem but I would like to put an end to it.

I got hit right after I posted here too. The site was one that was not on the list so I had 45 to delete.

Blaine.....have you modified the blacklist yet? I have had to add several to the list. I will send you the updated one if you like.

I just added the work 'sex' to the list and that appeared to be what caught this last barage.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com