Keeping Your Files Current
I have mentioned in previous posts that I have been having a lot of trouble with comment, trackback , and referrer spam on my blogs, especially my photo blog. The referrer reports are really worthless on tinkertech.net because the referrer spam has gotten so bad. While I thought I had blocked trackback spam on my blogs, it started flooding my sites again.
I did some research and decided to implement some WordPress plugins to help to combat the spam. The first was Spam Karma 2, an anti-spam plugin that helps to eliminate all forms of blog spam. So far so good, no more trackbacks or comment spam have gone live in my blogs. I also installed a Referrer Bouncer plugin to hopefully eliminate all of the junk in my logs. I won’t really be able to easily see if this is working until next month when I have some clear logs to view.
The biggest upgrade was the photo blog. I was using WordPress 1.5 and I had to upgrade to 1.5.3 in order to use the Spam Karma 2 plugin. So I performed the upgrade last night which completely tanked the layout. Too tired to do anything about it last night, I left it with the default WordPress theme.
This morning I got up and felt totally lazy; instead of doing a redesign on the photo blog I visited the WordPress Theme Browser and found a wonderful theme by Vladimir Simovic. I updated the header image to use my own photos and made a few tweaks to the CSS to accommodate my photos and I was done. My kind of upgrade!
I decided since I was playing with plugins that I would try out some Flickr plugins. I found this Flickr Badge plugin that allows me to display some of my recent Flickr photos in the sidebar of this blog. I like Flickr and I really like the fact that I can incorporate my Flickr photos into my sites. I’m in the process of moving my PBase galleries over to Flickr now.
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January 30th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Robin, give Bad Behavior and Akismet a try, in addition to Spam Karma, and you will find comment spam practically a thing of the past. I don’t know what Referrer Bouncer is, but Bad Behavior and Spam Karma do the job for me on my main site, and Akismet and Bad Behavior do the work on Wordpress.com.
Though a new comment spam-bot is making the rounds right now, so expect more comment spam getting through until these programs can smack it in the face.
December 18th, 2006 at 6:15 am
Someone else below asked this already about antispam scripts.
I am getting nailed with Spam on my website mails and in our blog website – now its offline too much spam. Is there anyway to stop this? If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up and active. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for help, Keep up the good work. Greetings from Poland
June 28th, 2007 at 9:09 am
you should use karma 2 script, it really good soft. im using this one to block spam comments.
October 29th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Thanks for great tutorial now i know how to save it!
October 31st, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Im using SpamKarma2 too, doing his job very good for now, killed over 80% spam on my blog.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:32 am
It’s very good article. Great site with very good look and perfect information.