Block Comment Spam Bots
Professional spammers use programs to automate their spamming. The ‘Block Comment Spam Bots’ (BCSB) plugin efficiently blocks their process. No more comment spam! As no legitimate user will use the professional spammer’s automated process which relies on cURL and WGET commands, real users will never
Professional spammers use programs to automate their spamming. The ‘Block Comment Spam Bots’ (BCSB) plugin efficiently blocks their process. No more comment spam!
As no legitimate user will use the professional spammer’s automated process which relies on cURL and WGET commands, real users will never notice the BCSB plugin at work. There are no CAPTCHAS for your visitors to interact with. No silly questions. Just the comment form as designed in any theme.
On the admin side, there are no blacklists, special keys (like Askimet), overloaded spam queues, or overworked databases that store spam comments until you manually delete them.
Install the plugin and that’s it. Invisible, to you and your visitors. The only change you will notice is in your admin area. The list of comments now has a green check next to them. That way you know that comment was made on your website by a real person and was not bypassed by hacking spammers connecting directly to your server.
All that remains is comments made by real people, and while real people can spam, it takes them time and effort. The amount of spam from real people is a lot more manageable than the tsunami from automated spammers, saving you time to concentrate on the important things in life, like your readers, and making connections.
We’ve tested it on multiple websites and it wipes out automated spam completely. If it doesn’t on your site, please let us know.
** Geeky Stuff ** …in case you are interested in how it works…
tl;dr – This provides a total and easy solution to comment spam from spam bots.
Comments are processed by the WordPress wp-post-comments.php file. Automated spammers (‘spam bots’) can provide (‘post’) data directly to that page, bypassing any comment processing, by using CURL/WGET commands.
Bypassing the comment form by posting directly (via CURL or WGET commands), is quite easy. Just send the post ID number, and the bot’s fake name and email, and the spammy content. Boom! Comment spam is on your site!
The result is comment spam – and that is not always caught by other comment spam checkers. Even if it is caught by programs such as Akismet, processing that spam takes some server resources, including writing to the database.
This plugin uses several techniques to ‘sense’ a spambot. There are hidden fields that are changed after a delay. There is a delay in displaying the submit button. And it blocks direct access to the WordPress post/processing functions.
The techniques, also used in our standalone “FormSpemmerTrap” (FST) program, and our other anti-spam plugins (like FormSpammerTrap for Comments), are very effective. They use a bit of JavaScript to block spambots – since automated processes via CURL/WGET/etc cannot process JS code.
