Defeating Wordpress Trackback Spam

Until yesterday I was getting 200 trackback spams a day.

Firstly I installed Trackback Validator, which works a treat at preventing trackback spam from going directly to your blog comments listing.

But you still get an email about the trackback, even though it is already classified as spam.

So I was looking through my referral logs and I noticed that I get a lot of visitors searching with the suspicious string “l3av3 a r3ply pr0udly p0w3r3d by w0rdpr3ss”. I used leet-speak so that google doesn’t flag up this site anew!

So I edited the wordpress code to change that string. You can find it in footer.php, and this is editable in the theme editor in wordpress admin. Hope this helps some people out there! (But not too many as then the spammers will catch on…)

I still wanted to attribute the blog to Wordpress, as it’s awesome, so the string now reads:

The Future Comes Second was formulated using teh awesome WordPress

Update [30-Jun-2006]

Actually, it turns out the www-redirect plugin I coincidentally activated on the same day as the above hack, had a bug that made it impossible to submit trackbacks and comments to this blog.. Although I still expect my measures to have some affect, I doubt it’ll be that much. Too good to be true eh?

Update [25-Jul-2006]

I changed the address for the site from http://methylblue.com/blog/ to http://www.methylblue.com/blog/, because I use the www-redirect plugin for Wordpress attacks by trackback spammers to the old address fail, as the POST is lost. Very little new trackback spam comes my way now and I’m hoping this is because I changed the string above.