Spam Under Control

After more than a month being spammed by viagra predators, alas I got a remedy that sort the problem out once and for all. Well, the spamming begin when one of my thread (Autumn Guests) was ‘infected’, that was the one that happens to be pimped by Making Plymouth Great/This Is Plymouth website. My spam busters such as Spam Karma, Akismet and Bad behaviour works well in preventing spam commentaries being displayed in the entry itself. But the nightmare was actually the shoutbox.

For your info, I was using Jalenack’s Live Shoutbox, which was based on the infamous AJAX shoutbox which was one of the most intelligent shoutbox around that you can find for your blog/website/BB. Most bloggers thinks that when you applied Spam Karma, Bad Behaviour and Akismet, they both block and take care ALL type of spams regardless method of entries. From my observation, this was wrong. The spam are pretty intelligent as they are target-specific (in my case). The one that targetted commentaries are DIFFERENT from the one that targets your shoutbox eventhough the spam contents are similar. Some of them seem to originate from the same IP domain, but most of them are NOT.

I almost crack my head thinking about the solution when I accidentally stumbled upon this solution that lies here, at Le Blog de Pierre, a French blogger’s blog. Pierre (author) has implemented some hacks on Jaleneck’s original plugin with some enhancement such as IP blocker and blacklister and smart keyword targetting. In the last 24 hours, only one spam got through the shoutbox while the rest was caught before it was even displayed and go public.

Here are some evidence that this neat plugin/hack really works!

Look at the 70 that was highlighted in red. Before the hack was applied, 70 spams would have infiltrated my shoutbox and made theirself public with all their chaos and glory. But now they are all history. The plugin wasn’t 100% perfect, but near perfect is good enough. So if you shoutbox freaks who still experience headaches of how to sort that problem go out, just cross over to that French monsieur, Le Blog de Pierre!! Il est le dieu! He’s da bomb!