The Spanner » spam-bam

Spambam beta test

Gareth Heyes — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 11:07:16 +0000

I’ve worked on a new version of Spambam which has a lot more features, it now doesn’t reject spam but simply moves it into a spam folder. I’d be interested in what everyone thinks about it and if this method is preferred to simply blocking all spam. The reason behind the method change was to stop valid comments from being rejected and give the ability to restore comments which are marked as spam.

The beta can be found here (Spambam is now part of Blogsecurity):-
Spambam beta

Blogsecurity

Gareth Heyes — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:25:05 +0000

I’m pleased to announce that I have recently joined Blogsecurity which is fantastic news because I can work with some excellent people and develop free open source software which will help blogging security.

WordPress Lockdown and WPIDS

We’ve already been working on a security plugin for WordPress which combines my previously unreleased plugin WP Lockdown and the PHPIDS WordPress plugin port by Philipp Heinze called WPIDS. I’m excited about this project because it will enable the average WordPress user to secure their installation in very easy steps.

Spambam

I have also donated my other WordPress plugin Spambam to the Blogsecurity project. A new version is currently being tested which will have a lot more features including Spam counting and display, it will now accept all comments but mark Spam and enable the blogger to retrieve a spam comment which has been identified incorrectly.

New Spambam plugin

Gareth Heyes — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:09:41 +0000

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.

Spambam hits 1000 downloads

Gareth Heyes — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:16:08 +0000

The Spanner started to get over 20-30 comment spams per day, I wasn’t happy! I decided to write a WordPress plugin that would prevent automated comment spam. The Spanner hasn’t had a single comment spam since I installed Spambam.

It works by creating a secret spambam key and storing this in a cookie generated by javascript, the spammer doesn’t execute javascript as they need to directly submit to the wordpress action file otherwise it would slow them down. The plugin is 100% free and I have also created a generic one which can be used by any form/blog.

WordPress version

Generic version

Protecting against form Spam

Gareth Heyes — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 10:31:41 +0000

Because of my success with WordPress comment spam protection I have decided to release another free version of SpamBam that will also protect any php form on any web site from spammers! The code is again released under GPL so anyone can use it for free or modify it.

Instructions

1. Download and unzip the SpamBam class.
2. Look at the sampleform.php file in the zip file to see how SpamBam is placed into your HTML form. (It must be a php file in order for it to work).
3. Look at the samplesend.php to see how to place SpamBam onto your send email section of your site. NOTE SpamBam does not actually send any emails, it just provides spam protection.

SpamBam new version

Gareth Heyes — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:11:11 +0000

I’ve launched a new version of SpamBam which fixes a minor problem reported by a user. The plugin is now available on the WordPress plugin page:-

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spambam/

It’s been a huge success and we don’t get any comment spam any more on our blog

SpamBam!

Gareth Heyes — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:28:14 +0000

Comment spam plugin

I’ve wrote a wordpress plugin that hopefully eliminates comment spam on our site as well as slows down the stupid comment spammers. The plugin is called SpamBam and it is released as freeware under the GPL license. The only drawback is that javascript is required to post a comment.

Update

The new version of SpamBam is out 1.2, it now allows WordPress comment spam protection to work alongside SpamBam.

Installation

To install the plugin simply create a folder called “spambam” in the “wp-content/plugins/” directory and place the spambam.php file in that folder. So your full path to the plugin should be “wp-content/plugins/spambam/spambam.php”. Once you have copied spambam to the folder, you need to enable it in the plugins section of the wordpress admin.

Download the current release
Unzip and copy the whole spambam folder to your plugins directory.
Enable SpamBam in the WP Admin >> Plugins section.
Done!

Optional configuration

SpamBam requires no configuration but if you wish to alter the delay option, by default SpamBam has a 30 second delay if it detects a comment spammer, you can change this in the spambam.php file to any value desired. The constant variable SPAMBAM_SPAMMER_DELAY is used to define the seconds delay. Change the following line (if required).

define('SPAMBAM_SPAMMER_DELAY', 30);