Stopping the spam flood

This post is more than 17 years old.

Posted at 22:50 on 04 February 2007

Following a recent flood of comment spam last week, I've decided to tighten up on my blog commenting policy. I'm now limiting comments to two hyperlinks each, which must not be in BBCode format. WordPress doesn't use BBCode anyway, and I've never seen a genuine comment on anybody's blog which contains more than one hyperlink, so I don't think this is going to be a problem.

I'm also going to close comments and trackbacks right across the board to any IP address which has three comments pending moderation in my spam queue or which gets trapped by Bad Behavior three times in a week. In practice, it's not likely to affect you unless you are running a spam bot on your computer or network.

If you want to do something similar on your own blog, it's handled by the the latest version (1.3) of Comment Timeout. Note that this is still in alpha, so use it at your own risk. It's configurable as before, so you can set it to allow three -- or more -- hyperlinks if you prefer.