The Knitting Fiend

I was surfing the political blogs, and I noticed this caution at next to comments at Ampersand’s Alas a blog.

NOTE: Due to a deluge of spam, comments using the words POKER or HOLDEM or VIAGRA or PHENTERMINE will be automatically deleted. Please be careful to avoid these words!

Everyone hates comment spam and uses different methods to minimize it. Alas a Blog evidently uses Wordpress’s default spam filtering to automatically delete comments containing “bad words” — like “poker”. I suspect Amp is listing only a few words he autodeletes. After all, the full list of “bad words” runs from “Adipex” to “Zyban”.

My blog runs on Wordpress, so I could use that method too. But, I don’t. I moderate comments containing those words, but I don’t auto delete them. That lets me permit human visitors to enter what they want– but I do reserve the right to delete comments.

Still, I do a lot of other things that prevent spam. It’s just that in my case, I try to do things to recognize and turn back spam bots so they never get far enough to leave comments containing these terms.

My front line of spam control is a set of .htaccess files. I can use these because my site runs on an Apache server. I install some at the top of my site directory, and others in certain sub-folders. For the benefit of others, here’s the chunk of the .htaccess file I use to keep a huge number of poker, pharmaceutical and porn spammers out of my site. This is bit of code is contained in the .htaccess file installed at the top of my site:

.htaccess

Do I do other things?

My full htaccess file also includes a list of bad user agents. But, I’m finding very little spam is blocked by that list. The current banes of my existence are referrer and trackback spam. The portion of the htaccess file I provide above weeds out lots of bad referrers.

I also run Referrer Karma which eliminates the referrer spam not caught by my htaccess file. I like ReferrerKarma, but I need to caution users that it seems to identify many web based email referrers and a number of craft forums as spam. If you use Referrer Karma, be sure to learn how to find the Spam Karma logs and black list table. Check regularly to make sure good referrers haven’t been blacklisted; if they have, add these urls to your SpamKarma whitelist.txt file. Also, for reasons I will explain in a future article, be sure to add your own site and the address of whatever host you visit when examining your site statistics.

But, there’s more! I also run Bad Behavior; it does a wonderful job eliminating most trackback spam. HashCash does a wonderful job preventing spammers from entering comments (but use with caution if you are concerned about preventing comments from blind persons. )

Is there a risk to using htaccess? Yes. If there is a typo in your file, your entire site will not load. I created a directory containing one page to test .htaccess files after editing. I load the new .htacess file to that folder, and check whether the page loads. If the new htaccess file passes that test, I load the edited file to the top directory of my site.

Of course, there is another risk. Some URLs containing the word “poker” may actually be knitting sites directing knitters here. I might lose traffic.

I’m not going to worry about that risk.