I get a lot of comment spam. Trackbacks are now disabled out of frustration, and most of the spam from the website itself gets eaten by Akismet. Not all, though. Wordpress allows comments containing a certain number of links to automatically be redirected into the moderation queue, which is useful at stopping spam going public but over this weekend resulted in dozens of spam messages containing dozens of links needing to be deleted manually.
Anti‑Link–Spam for Wordpress is a very crude plug‑in that blocks all comments containing 5 or more URLs. In fact, it’s cruder than that; it will block all comments containing 5 or more instances of the string ‘http://’ — so it’ll block mis‑directed BBCode ‘[url=]’ spam as well. I’ve not added any comment type filters either, so it should also parse trackbacks and pingbacks if you like to leave them enabled.
It’s not pretty, there’s no configuration screen (you can change the hyperlink count by setting a variable in the code, and edit the HTML of the error message as well), but I’m confident it’ll reduce my comment moderation burden.
Download Anti‑Link–Spam 1.0 for Wordpress.
I’ve also put up an Anti‑Link–Spam page, where you can always find the latest version.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.