Block List Updater
Few users are familiar with the comment block list built into WordPress. Located in the WordPress admin area under “Settings”—“Discussion”, that block list for incoming comments accepts values (words) to identify spam by. Additionally to plugins like Antispam Bee in order to fight spam successfully a curated comment block list is recommendable. You can either update the list manually, or utilize a very detailed global comment block list that gets updated on a regular basis. Block List Updater has been developed to keep your comment block list in your WordPress installation up to speed with the curated global list on GitHub. The plugin will check the global comment block list on GitHub multiple times a day. Whenever new anti-spam values have been added to the global list, Block List Updater will read the global list and update your WordPress database accordingly. While the check-up process will run several times a day, the plugin will only update the database when it detects an actual change of the global comment block list on GitHub. Support Community support via the support forums on wordpress.org We don’t handle support via e-mail, Twitter, GitHub issues etc. Contribute Active development of this plugin is handled on GitHub. Pull requests for documented bugs are highly appreciated. If you think you’ve found a bug (e.g. you’re experiencing unexpected behavior), please post at the support forums first. If you want to help us translate this plugin you can do so on WordPress Translate. Credits Author: Sergej Müller Maintainers: pluginkollektiv
Disable Trackbacks
When it comes to spam and pingbacks/trackbacks, the vast majority by far is via trackbacks rather than pingbacks. Very, very few people use trackbacks for legitimate uses anymore (I’ve gotten less than 5 in the last 8 months) as WordPress, etc. all use pingbacks now as their primary ping method. I had already installed Cookies For Comments which successfully stops most spam comments but I still had to deal with the tons of trackback spam. So, I wrote this plugin. It will disable new trackbacks across your site, both legitimate and spam. However since very few people use trackbacks legitimately, this combined with Cookies For Comments should cut your spam down to next to zero. Why should I use this plugin over one of those trackback validator plugins? Most non-Akismet style anti-trackback spam plugins work by connecting to the URL that sent the trackback and looking for a link to your blog. The problem with this is that many spammers actually post links to your blog in their spam posts rendering those types of plugins useless. Even those that check the IP address to make sure it matches are beaten by spam blogs (aka splogs). In the end it’s up to you what to use for anti-spam, but I personally use Cookies For Comments, this plugin, and then Akismet to catch anything that makes it through.
