active 1 year, 9 months ago
Ted Mann
I'm the Digital Development Director for Gannett NJ. Meaning that I coordinate the combined web efforts of the six Gannett newspapers in the Garden State, including app.com, courierpostonline.com, mycentraljersey.com, dailyrecord.com, and thedailyjournal.com. A big focus of my work lately has been on building out our staff blogs, and developing a series of hyperlocal community blogs called injersey.com, based on BuddyPress and WPMU.
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@TedMann – No, manually going to your signup page will not trip the spam alarm. Putting in the URL with all the submit stuff (like attempting to pass registration info via the URL instead of entering it like a human) will trip the alarm. What it’s checking for is the POST command, and was THAT passed through [...]
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@TedMann I think someone more knowledgeable about things .htaccess could better answer that question. I’m really still learning about all this stuff myself. About your other idea though… now that could be brilliantly simple! It could sure put one heck of a damper on the efforts of human sploggers who are, if their activities are any [...]
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@TedMann If you’re using the same machine that you normally use to access that page, it’s highly unlikely that you get redirected, ‘cuz as site admin, your IP has already been “goldlisted” and you’re known as one of the good guys. To really test if it’s working properly, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be, try [...]
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@TedMann This is what I’ve added to .htaccess to block bots: # IF THE UA STARTS WITH THESE RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(aesop_com_spiderman|alexibot|backweb|bandit|batchftp|bigfoot) RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(black.?hole|blackwidow|blowfish|botalot|buddy|builtbottough|bullseye) RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}…[Read more]
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@tedmann when I had the rogue bbpress register file and I was getting spammers sign up I could identify them because under ‘users’ they were listed only as users of their subsites rather than my main site – (which I dont believe is possible through legitimate registration?) However, last night I had another such registration. Granted, [...]
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@tedmann – and changed the default text on the register page?
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@tedmann have you added all the tricks mentioned? changed footer links? added referer rule to your .htaccess
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@tedmann – have a search on your install for the bbPress folder and remove the register.php file. I guess it doesn’t have to be activated for the file still to be there and therefore usable by the spammers.
It worked like a treat for myself and @footybible
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@tedmann – there was a register file kicking around in the bbPress forum files, and I think that was the back door into the BuddyPress system. I don’t know if that issue has been addressed in the latest BuddyPress / bbPress releases. We stopped spam registrations almost completely on Hello Eco Living by removing the register [...]