Stop spammers and unwanted traffic
in WWW, Webdev, wordpress / tags: .htaccess, antispam, tutorial, typepad, wordpress
If you have your blog installed in your own webhosting account, there is another nice strategy to combat spammers and also unwanted traffic by Donncha O Caoimh (he is a WordPress developer). It’s because sometime antispam plugins like Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam are not enough. They can blocked comments, but do they also block unwanted traffic? I mean, they can filter comment spams, but that’s after the spammers’s comment being processed by the system (blog engine).
I think the approach offered by Donncha is very useful. Right now, I use another method to fight the spammers (and also unwanted traffic). For my WordPress, I have TypePad AntiSpam and Yawasp (Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin). I decided to remove WP-SpamFree for now. It’s a great plugin, anyway. But, sometime it caught real readers from sending comment, just because their browser settings are not cookie-enabled.
About dealing with unwanted traffic (it’s not directly related to spams), I use hotlink prevention using .htaccess. Another method is by having list of IP addresses in my .htaccess. I got the IP address from antispam plugins. If I got spammers, I just put their IP address into my ban list. I have some of them.
By this, I have less visitors (if I checked from my webhosting analysis tool). Probably, it’s because it checks all visitors (spammers and human). But, I’m fine with that. I think I will try the strategies mentioned by Donncha now.
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