HeadChange

Cooking up WordPress comment spam, nice and hot!

The inter­net is not only a place for infor­ma­tion, it’s a spam­mer heaven ever since peo­ple real­ized that they could cre­ate com­puter pro­grams to gen­er­ate mas­sive amounts of links to help improve PageR­ank and search engine posi­tions. Lucky for us Word­Press users, it’s the eas­i­est plat­form to spam.

Ever since the spam rev­o­lu­tion, search engines have changed their rank­ing algo­rithms try­ing to stop the spam­mers. The fun­ni­est thing about Word­Press spam­mers, is that they are wast­ing their time. Even if they do suc­ceed in blast­ing links all over Word­Press blogs, it doesn’t help their search engine rank­ing at all. At one point, this was a suc­cess­ful Black­Hat SEO method at one time, but Google no longer fol­lows or indexes com­ment pages. In an unlikely sce­nario, the spam­mers link could get clicked on if the blog owner did not remove the spam com­ment, so I guess it’s not com­pletely pointless.

Plu­g­ins to help stop the spam
The absolute best tool I have found for fight­ing spam is Akismet. This plu­gin is present in all new WP installs. With Akismet, you still have to do some spam sift­ing, but the more times you mark com­ments as spam and not as spam, the more Akismet learns. The plu­gin has been around for a long time, mean­ing that it has got­ten pretty good at detect­ing spam. Most of the time, it does a very good job at detect­ing spam (by cross-referencing the IP of the author and words in the comment).

When I notice that the same IP or range of IPs are attempt­ing to spam my blog, I pull up the good old handy WP-Ban tool, copy the IP, add a wild card if nec­es­sary, and keep them from ever spam­ming my blog again from that IP or range. This can some­what be done within the Word­Press core, but it is not nearly as pow­er­ful as WP-Ban. This plu­gin allows you to ban IPs, IP ranges, refer­rer URLs, host names and even user agents. Unlike when ban­ning IPs within the Word­Press core, WP-Ban does not let any machine that meets any part of the blacklist’s cri­te­ria even access your blog. It also keeps stats of each item such as how many spam attempts were made and whatnot.

When using the WP-Ban plu­gin, be very care­ful when ban­ning cer­tain IP addresses, espe­cially your own. If you acci­den­tally ban your IP address, you won’t be get­ting back into your blog until you acquire a new IP. Block­ing cer­tain ranges of IPs can block poten­tial read­ers. Only ban IP addresses that you know are spam­ming your blog (ie. Akismet shows mul­ti­ple spam attempts from the same IP. I have com­piled a list of spam­mer IPs, click here to see them. If you’re unsure if the IP is a spam­mer, you can check it against the Stop Forum Spam data­base. This site reveals a lot of infor­ma­tion about spam­mers includ­ing IP, email, user­name, host­name and more.

One of the best ways to keep spam com­ments from being dis­played on your WP blog is to require that all com­ments be approved by an admin­is­tra­tor before they are shown on the post (This can be done in Set­tings > Dis­cus­sion > Tick ‘Admin must approve’. You can also set up a black­list for cer­tain words, ip’s, emails and user­names. This has some dis­ad­van­tages though… When a spam­mer hits your site, they nor­mally try to send hun­dreds of com­ments, so sort­ing through all of the com­ments to find legit ones will be a task.

List of IP addresses that spam Word­Press blogs:
91.214.45.169
213.5.69.40
41.72.219.79
80.73.82.193
121.138.130.145
200.238.102.162
66.232.107.104
66.232.102.40
200.209.174.181
88.102.213.218
81.95.149.42
218.140.138.174
66.232.102.40
125.140.41.45
198.151.39.35
89.108.89.42
213.149.167.23
221.115.163.221
74.52.90.234
200.238.102.162
66.232.102.40
200.118.113.210
210.126.24.39
58.103.65.153
81.95.149.42
66.232.102.40
61.222.136.70
193.202.63.138
220.124.118.104
202.28.27.3
121.138.130.145
200.67.147.101
121.131.155.98
194.105.214.178
80.73.82.193
121.138.130.145
200.238.102.162
66.232.107.104
66.232.102.40
200.209.174.181
88.102.213.218
81.95.149.42
218.140.138.174
66.232.102.40
125.140.41.45
198.151.39.35
89.108.89.42
213.149.167.23
200.238.102.162
74.52.90.234
203.75.169.162
202.149.216.154
66.232.102.40
202.66.107.7
190.7.79.254
61.73.146.1
206.222.198.98
210.4.3.66
193.251.9.73
59.12.215.88
202.166.170.6
125.137.127.45
66.232.102.40
201.80.174.111
194.105.214.178
212.1.105.94
200.55.215.83
66.192.6.131
66.232.102.40
200.238.102.162
190.7.79.254
200.21.91.107
203.211.151.251
200.238.102.162
190.7.79.254

Display random posts without a WordPress plugin

Have you ever wanted to make a list of ran­dom posts or just show a sin­gle ran­dom post? This tuto­r­ial will show you how.

There are some plu­g­ins out there for WP that are phe­nom­e­nal,  but some of them are really point­less. Though I love plu­g­ins, Word­Press is already capa­ble of doing tons of things that peo­ple write plu­g­ins to do.

Alright, let’s get onto the code. Keep in mind, you can­not place this code in your Word­Press pages or posts, this has to go in your themes or tem­plate files.

<ul><?php
 $rand_posts = get_posts('numberposts=5&orderby=rand');
 foreach( $rand_posts as $post ) :
 ?>
 <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
 <?php the_title(); ?>
 </a></li>
 <?php endforeach; ?></ul>

This script assumes that you will be dis­play­ing the items in an unordered list, if you just want to show the items with breaks after them, delete the <ul>, </ul>, <li> and replace </li> with <br />.