Archive for the tag 'trackback'

stop trackback spam on Wordpress blogs

Posted by mark on September 16, 2008 under Development

I’ve found the Wordpress plugin Trackback Validator being effective. It simply checks whether my blog entry is really referenced in the page trackbacking – that’s what you should expect in legitimate trackbacks and what spammers often don’t do. Trackbacks missing that reference are immediately marked as spam.

As I let myself notify about new comments and Wordpress treats trackbacks as such, I receive emails with an excerpt of the spam-text. The plugin doesn’t surpress them. Annoying.

So, here’s a workaround for Apache to deny posting by clients with known User Agent strings:

BrowserMatch "^\-$" is_a_robot
BrowserMatch "^Jakarta" is_evil
BrowserMatch "^libghttp\/1" is_evil

<Directory />
<LimitExcept GET>
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from env=is_evil
        Deny from env=is_a_robot
</LimitExcept>
</Directory>

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