A couple of weeks ago, I was so excited to see that I had a lot of ‘comments’ for moderation only to find out that they’re all spam – all 43 of them! I then thought, how could comment spam go through if I have the captcha plugin installed? At first, I thought the spammers were deliberately typing in their spam into my blog but when I checked, all the ‘comments’ were actually trackback spam! Now I know how it got through captcha. For those who don’t know, captcha is a wordpress comment plugin that adds a set of characters to type in a small graphic before someone can post a comment.
On the other hand, trackbacks are ‘comments’ that are automatically posted when someone links to your site and ‘pings’ your site. Trackbacks are highly automated and therefore should not pass through captcha. So what spammers do is exploit this loophole to post their spams on people’s blogs hoping that they will be approved OR be automatically approved by the system if moderation of comments is disabled. In my case, comment moderation was turned on so I was able to catch the problem before they were posted on my site.
My next step now was to look for a solution. My first logical solution was to enter common spam words in the Wordpress admin under Options->Discussion. So I went to copy a list of common spam words from the wordpress website and pasted them in the proper place under Options->Discussion. I then waited for a 3 days and to my amazement, trackback spam went down from 10 per day to only 1 per week! Not bad huh? I then tried turning off the captcha plugin to see if it spam goes up but it still stayed at one per week. So I turned off captcha and decided to give it a few more months. So far, comment spam is still down to 1 per week and I find that tolerable enough. So I conclude that this solves my Trackback spam problem. I’ve also included my ‘moderation settings’ in my website for those who want to try my setup in fighting trackback spam.
I heard that the Akismet plugin works better than my method so you can give it a try. The Akismet plugin is already included by default in your wordpress installation. You just need to enable it.
Enjoy!