New Spambam plugin

Friday, 7 September 2007

I’ve finally taken the time to update my spam protection plugin for WordPress, the original plugin worked well and stopped pretty much any automated spam. But I decided to update it because a few users were reporting problems on this site and other sites, for some reason it didn’t work with IE7. Rather than just fix it….

The latest plugin uses my PHP/JS randomisation techniques to create a key and protect against spam. I’ve took this bold move to see what affect it has and if the blog spammers will get round it because it no longer uses javascript cookies. My post on Javascript/PHP randomisation can be found here (with source code) the WordPress plugin can be found on the WordPress site.

The entry 'New Spambam plugin' was posted on September 7th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under php, Security, spam-bam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Responses to “New Spambam plugin”

  1. Nick writes:
    No. 1 — September 27th, 2007 at 3:59 pm

    Hi there,
    I’d like to suggest a feature, if you check my site you’ll see in the footer I like to show how much spam plugins block.

    If you insert
    <code>
    $counter = get_option(‘spambam_spam_count’);
    $counter = $counter + 1;
    update_option( ‘spambam_spam_count’, $counter );
    </code>
    after
    <code>sleep(SPAMBAM_SPAMMER_DELAY);</code>

    we can have “Spambam has blocked x spams since installed” within our themes… it’s a cool way of show how effective each plugin is 🙂

  2. Gareth Heyes writes:
    No. 2 — September 27th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    Hi Nick

    Yes good idea I shall add that feature into the next release.

  3. Gary Harvey writes:
    No. 3 — September 29th, 2007 at 7:22 am

    Hi Gareth.

    I uploaded the plugin folder and activated it but get this error msg.

    Warning: join() [function.join]: Bad arguments. in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/spambam/spambam.php on line 43

    Warning: join() [function.join]: Bad arguments. in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/spambam/spambam.php on line 43
    We don’t allow comment spam here. Javascript is required to submit a comment.

    Ideas?

    Gary

  4. Gareth Heyes writes:
    No. 4 — September 29th, 2007 at 9:42 am

    Hi Gary

    It appears that your server doesn’t support sessions or uses a old method of sessions. You could try a run a find and replace the following lines:-

    FIND:
    1. $_SESSION[‘spambam_result’] = ”;
    2. return join(“”,$_SESSION[‘spambam_result’]);
    3. $_SESSION[‘spambam_result’] = $randomJS->result;

    REPLACE:
    1. global $HTTP_SESSION_VARS;
    $HTTP_SESSION_VARS[‘spambam_result’] = ”;
    2. global $HTTP_SESSION_VARS;
    return join(“”,$HTTP_SESSION_VARS[‘spambam_result’]);

    3. global $HTTP_SESSION_VARS;
    $HTTP_SESSION_VARS[‘spambam_result’] = $randomJS->result;

  5. Clyde Gill writes:
    No. 5 — February 6th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

    I found this thread searching for this error string, “We don’t allow comment spam here. Javascript is required to submit a comment.” which is occuring sporadically when comments are submitted. Seems odd that it does not happen all of the time. I have 5 separate wordpress blogs running on one online server and one offline server, all using spam bam, and this is only occuring on one of the online server blogs. This error has happened to one of my contributors a few times and just now happened to me. All pc’s involved have java running.

    I wanted to check to see if you thought the code in the 4th comment above would work!? My error code does not include all the other ‘Warnings’ that Gary posted.

    I’ve used spam bam on my other blogs for quite some time now with great effect!

  6. Gareth Heyes writes:
    No. 6 — February 6th, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    @Clyde

    Hi, a new version is in development and should be released next week. It contains many improvements and should fix these bugs.

  7. Chelsea writes:
    No. 7 — February 18th, 2008 at 10:17 am

    “We don’t allow comment spam here. Javascript is required to submit a comment.”

    I’ve been experiencing the same problem. Many people complained of not being able to comment on my blog recently (even if they’ve been able to in the past).

  8. Gareth Heyes writes:
    No. 8 — February 18th, 2008 at 10:33 am

    @Chelsea

    Sorry about that, I know of this bug and I’m working on the new version. Would you mind beta testing it for me? If so I’ll post the latest version here

  9. HP Bryce writes:
    No. 9 — September 3rd, 2010 at 8:16 am

    I am glad so many people are using what they know to stop Spam. Is this project still ongoing now askimet is out?

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