Great work!  Spam Karma is working bug-free for me now   How did you get “Spam Karma has eaten 574 comment spams…” on your page?  It would be great to add that

Greetings!

Love the idea of your plug-in. I have it installed but for some reason all comments but my own are being deleted. Where do I go from here and what info do you need in order to help with this problem?

Kickass plugin Dr. Dave! I especially appreciate the work you’ve put into automating the install.

Hi Paul, do you also have PHP 4.1.2 (running on Debian “Woody”)?

@Dr. Dave: Since it seems there wasn’t an error like this before (at least there’s nothing to be found about it), maybe this is due to some changes in the latest version?

This is a great plug-in and I *think* it’s working for us, but I’m not sure.

When I go to http://www.organicchurch.net/wp-admin/admin.php?page=spam-karma.php – the page provokes a 404 error. And when I go to http://www.organicchurch.net/wp-content/plugins/spam-karma.php?spamk_setup I have a db error at the top like this:

Database error: [Unknown column 'option_name' in 'where clause']
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `wp_optionvalues` WHERE `option_name` IN (’save_comment_max_links’, ’save_comments_notify’, ’save_moderation_notify’, ’save_moderation_keys’, ’spamk_saved_options’)

But I’ve never had db errors on any other plug-ins I’ve run and I’m using Wordpress 1.3-alpha-2. I also get that error when I try to do anything on the page, e.g. update blacklist etc.

Any ideas?

Hi Jay,

I just checked and indeed the “OSA fields” that are added by SK to your comment form automatically are not present. This is a common problem and will make every comment fail if the “OSA” filter is enabled in SK’s Options. Since comments use to work before, I’d assume the issue comes from some modification you might have brought to your template (I suspect something having to do with the fact you use the pop-up instead of an inline comment section)…
Best and easiest way to solve the problem is to insert the following call inside the comment form in your pop-up template:
<?php osa_form(); ?>

Spam Karma works great in WordPress 1.3 but I couldn’t get it to install in my Pictoralis install, a hacked version of 1.2. Keep getting Fatal error: Call to undefined function: __() in /…/spam-karma.php on line 904 when I tried to configure it. I was having trouble with it not recognizing the sites listed in WordPress’s own moderation panel so I did the easiest thing, deleted the php that lets people comment.

Once again, thanks for the great plugin. I hope you are enjoying your holidays. One of my presents was over 500 comment spams in less than 24 hours, and SpamKarma caught all of them. The weird thing was that all the domains and links were .com. So was it just an attempt to fill up the blacklist with garbage, since it didn’t seem to link to anything profitable? In any case, it was quite tedious to uncheck all the garbage domains and then hit update so that they didn’t enter the blacklist. For future attackes of this type, I would love a “delete all” button to remove all these garbage domains from the blacklist. But when you get back from your vacation – hope you enjoy the rest of it!

I had SpamKarma 1.12 working just fine with my WP 1.2.2 blog. Upgraded to SpamKarma 1.14 today and started getting this error: “Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_INC in /home/(my account)/public_html/wp-content/plugins/spam-karma.php on line 2168″

PHP ver is 4.3.10

Jonathan: Heh, sorry you caught us right in the middle of a hasty upgrade… that little glitch was fixed the second before you posted your comment Simply upgrade again from the latest file and it should fix it.
FYI This has actually nothing to do with the one-click upgrade… it only seemed to work better because in the short span of time it took you to do the install again, I had updated the corrected binaries
One day I will maybe accept the fact that every single time I bring even the slightest most innocuous change to the code and take it live without testing, Murphy’s law will find me and bite me hard in the ass…

Carsten: Indeed, this is a new spamming trend. Which seems to prove some people out there are getting very frustrated trying to go through SK and are starting to try polluting blacklist data etc. The upcoming SK 2.0 and its blacklist management on steroids should easily take care of that…

In the meantime, I know it’s definitely a pain to have to uncheck all these entries manually each time, but there’s an easy way around it: just approve them all, and leave them like that for a while (provided they are truly random invalid URL as most of them seem to be these days, they can’t really hurt much) until you get enough to warrant a “Blacklist Reset”… Which will simply erase all entries in your blacklist and redownload again from the master server. You will lose accumulated IPs and spam URLs that you might have added yourself, but usually, these are only useful for a short span of time anyway. The master blacklist should be enough to handle 99% of the spam you’d be getting…

Dr. Dave: Thank you for the plugin! I had a problem or two with it at first (legit comments were being sent to hell). But I was able to figure out the problem, and now it works masterfully!

Dude, thanks a bunch. I was getting spammed roughly 6 per hour – nonstop. And one day I recieved 600 spams in less than 12hours!!! I was getting ready to switch from WP. Thank you, and the WP community!

Lotsa Karma your way!

To everyone facing the empty page problem and since Dave seems to be on well deserved holidays:

The solution is simple.

1. Open wp-content/wp-plugins/spam-karma.php in a text editor
2. In the 5. line – starting with “Description: ” – move quite to the
end and replace wp-content/plugins/spam-karma.php?spamk_setup with
wp-content/plugins/spam-karma.php?spamk_setup=1 twice (both as the
href argument and between the a-tags).

That’s it, as far as I see

The reason is that the parameter spank_setup, which invokes the setup,
isn’t recognized by older PHP versions if it has no value assigned.

If you have version 1.14 alpha 5 of SK (most recent, I think), this is
already replaced once, but it seems Dave forgot the href
part.

Isn’t the version number wrong on this page? At the top…

I have updated rbl.jamesoff.net (http://rbl.jamesoff.net) to pull blacklisted URLs from the database (instead of having it as a static list I updated) now. This means that URL information can be dynamically added to by external users, and that it auto-expires as needed just like the IP information.

If anyone would like to help me test out my modifications to SK which make it automatically submit IPs and URLs to the RBL, please mail me or see the webpage

You should check and see if your host has the GD modules installed on your server – - it’s what will create the images of the letters and numbers. We recently installed it on our servers due to requests from clients…. though not all servers have it and rely on ImageMajik instead – - however, ImageMajik doesn’t handle the requests for this plugin.

Just a suggestion for a possible fix for you.

Has anyone reported the TB feature to work for WP 1.2.2? I keep getting spammed.

Hmm, at which level have you set the general algorithm? Mine is at normal.

SK is trashing legitimate comments? What have I screwed up?

I have the same problem as Anat and Lisa. It just let me do a comment with a lot of spam keywords and URLs in it.

I’m using WP1.2.2, spam karma 1.16 alpha2, Spam-Karma set to Very Strict. I unchecked “Automatically approve comment submitted by a logged-in user of at least user level:” and ” Take in account moderation criteria set on the Discussion page.” All other Advanced options are checked.

One of my readers can’t even see “leave a comment” portion of the page when I have Spam Karma activated. She uses AOL as her browser, I don’t know if that makes a difference or not. Is there anything I can do to change this?

I have a problem where Spam Karma resets itself and forgets all its options (i.e. the fields in the setup screen are empty). That happens about once a day (as I suddenly get email with digests for single messages instead of the previously configured 50) and also resets the “number of spam eaten” counter. This is with WordPress 1.2.2 and Spam Karma 1.16a3. Help?

Fantastic! I install SK and nothing gets through. You have made the world a better place. Thanks

Hey, dude, just wanted to say, this thing looks really cool. WP is a pain with all the comment spam, so I am glad this thing is around. I’ll be checkin it out!

I’ve been having big problems with SK eating good comments. All of them, basically. First, it blocked good commenters because their IPs were on the blacklist. So I turned the blacklist off. Still getting eaten. I keep scaling down the options, and still no one can ever comment.

Like Heliologue, I’m having problems with SK denying good comments. In the last 24 hours I’ve had one of my own comments and another person’s comment both denied with the following reason given: “The comment must be made from the same IP address as what requested the comment form.”

I’ve turned off the requirement that the IP which submits the form must be the same as the IP that requested it. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

In addition, I’d like to suggest an improvement to the default comment denial message. The current “bad karma” message is more than a little perplexing to honest commenters who have been mistakenly denied. I would prefer to see a message something like the following:

Certain aspects of your comment have triggered the Spam Karma anti-spam plugin, which is used by this weblog to block comment and trackback spam. As a result, your comment will not appear on the site.

If you believe this to be an error, please notify the weblog’s author.

That would be far more enlightening, and gives legitimate commenters an idea of what to do next.

I believe I have found an error in the spam-karma.php osa_get_code function.

As it is now, the function uses $_SERVER['LOCAL_ADDR'] to generate the md5 hash for the osa code. This should be $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] instead (at least on my server).

Before I replaced the two instances of $_SERVER['LOCAL_ADDR'] with $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] Spam Karma refused every comment (even good ones), giving a “OSA: Code invalid/forged” message. After this fix, Spam Karma seemed to accept comments normally again.

Before I go into answering any of the comments above, for those who missed it, reading: http://unknowngenius.com/blog/archives/2005/01/14/sick-of-this-crap/ might help explaining why I haven’t done so in a long while, and why even this status update is only limited to the minimum.
Basically, because I am a control-freak perfectionist, it’s unlikely I’ll leave any blatant bug unfixed, but do not expect me to spend any more hours debugging or supporting SK at the moment: I have too many other things to do (including possibly develop a better tool).

Now:

Anybody having issues with anything related to “OSA”: please read the manual, lisez le manuel, lesen Sie das Handbuch!
If all fails: disable OSA filters in the Options.

Anybody with Captcha-related issues:
- update (well, that one is true for *anybody* with *any* issue, of course).
- use the captcha test page to see what’s wrong.
- if the test page tells you it cannot find “GD” or some other related PHP stuff, contact your host and ask them about it.
- if the test page seems ok, but the letters do not appear, you are probably using PHP with a Debian install, which seems to have some weird issue about using FreeType fonts out of system folder. I *might* have fixed that in the last version (any confirmation would be great), if not, then it’s not really hard to fix, but won’t be taking on it before a while (feel free to do and send me a diff).
- last resort: disable Captcha in the Options page

Trackback filtering issues (and other bugs) were mostly due to new incompatibilities introduced by recent versions of WP alpha 1.5: to this day, they should have been fixed, BUT support for any newer 1.5 CVS update is officially discontinued (i.e.: it might work, but you are on your own). See entry link at the top for details.

Anybody complaining about SK letting your OWN test spam going through: just call me back when a REAL spam goes through, and then email me the full headers and details of what happened. SK is *built* to tell the difference between you and a spammer. it’s smarter than you think.

Overall, consider SK incompatible with WP’s built in spam word list (especially in WP 1.2), it will override it and ignore it as much as it can; which is a good thing.

Everybody else: either upgrade (if you haven’t done so already) or read the detailed documentation. Your solution in there.

Improvements suggestions and insightful bug reports much appreciated, duly noted and will be acted upon time permitting.

Cheers everybody.

Where is the captcha test page? I’m probably missing something here but I can’t find it.

If you need to use Spam Karma with Staticize Reloaded, see this url for information about keeping dynamic elements dynamic. http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Staticize

I have a patch of spam-karma.php available here that adds the relevant code. Enjoy.

Forget it, it won’t work and I can’t edit comments. To see the tags, visit the url I first linked, or check out the patch.

Maybe this got mentioned somewhere, but I couldn’t find it…
If you want trackback spam to be removed as well, get wp-includes/functions.php and comment out the die(); at the end of trackback_response. If you don’t do this, spam karma never gets to see the spam.

Another helpful thing is to comment out the wp_notify_postauthor in the same file; This will prevent you from getting mail spammed when there are lots of comments or trackbacks coming.

If you have any easier way to make trackback checking work or for disabling the mail stuff, tell me.

Anyone have good luck using this with WP 1.5 “gamma” (i.e. the latest nightlies)? I’d like to upgrade, but don’t want to lose spam protection.

Good news, Tom. Thanks.

I tried upgrading and then I tested the captcha page. This is what I saw:
-Captcha-Debug: Check given TrueType-Array! (1)
-Captcha-Debug: Valid TrueType-files: (0)No Truetypefont available for the CaptchaClass.

However, the captcha_fonts dir exits and is 777, and the thisprty.ttf is inside and is 777 as well.

Any help?

Thanks a lot for this great plugin, the only problem I have is that it doesn’t catch some of the Trackback spam but hey nothing is perfect. Thanks for your time drDave.

Hi – spam karma works great but like one of the posters above it seems to reset all the settings every so often. I’ve checked through the documentation and the other posts but can’t find an issue that would cause this. Any clues?

Like Ian D. I’m having trouble with SK not remebering it’s settings. It has a tendency to turn on every checkbox in the options section. This means that commenting for older posts is turned off, and the OSA check is really strict (with a max time as well as a minimal time). Right now I have to periodically check if this has happened, because I want people to be able to comment on older movie reviews after seeing the movie on TV.

One thing I notice is that it doesn’t change any numeric values, like the digest size. Just all the checkboxes…

I hope this helps…

I’m getting this after installing spam-karma:

[Tue Feb 15 19:40:23 2005] [error] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 4194304 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 8192 bytes) in */wp-content/plugins/spam-karma.php on line 244

Hello,

It would be cool itf the text was in a separate file in order to facilitate localization (especially when upgrading I’m in my third rewrite of the stuff it becomes a problem).

Thanks and congratulations

Comment Spam

If you are a long time blog reader you know that for months, many sites have disabled commenting, or taken other extreme measures to cut down on the comment spam. Seems that the subhuman monsters that do this have created automatic bots that just crea…

Hey unlike other Spam systems this actually installs OK and seems to work great..! I’ll have to wait til that fecking tigerspice.com lot come back as they have repeatedly (no renaming your comments page doesn’t work anymore).

One thing is that 777 is not allowed on my server, does odd things like locking me out of my own files…so for the captcha_temp directory which needs to be in the Spam-karma directory (too me a while to work that one out as it’s not in the distribution) try setting 764 – why should the public ever need to do a write or execute?…I’m on Valuehosts and I think they’ve doen something to stop public write and execute…

Anyway the image worked then (before it locked the file and showed a broken image), and works fine…now to check to see if it’s working?

Looks great! Thanks!

Hi! Just installed Spam Karma. It works like a charm. My blog is here http://darshan.joggroup.com

Why is it saying the SPAM filtering is triggered & image verification is displayed everytime. I thought it displays image verification only if its suspicious.

Is there any way to always have OSAs enabled?

Reason is that Spam Karma is catching the spam (great) but ideally I want to prevent it getting posted in the first place – it seems the bots count this is a result (even if it doesn’t show) and keep coming back for more – I’ve had 17 posts since my post above and keep getting emails despite clicking ‘ignore’ and the bot getting -16 karma below that threshold!

Reason is that this is the only OSA/ Captcha thingummy that’s worked, all others like gudfly steadfastly refuse to work on my server.

Tim, try WP-HashCash. It sounds like what you’re looking for, and I’ve had no problems using it with Spam Karma.
For WP v1.2.x: http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/11/29/spam-stopgap-extreme/
For WP v1.5: http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/wp-hashcash/branches/

Use “bl.spamcop.net.” instead of “bl.spamcop.net” (notify dot in the end), because if my /etc/resolv.conf have “search” item (in my case, nozonenet.com) and a wildcard A RR (*.nozonenet.com IN A 205.218.64.7), then gethostbyname($rbl_query) != $rbl_query forever, then all user will be blocked.

And it will increase performance in some case

WordPress v1.5 has been out of beta for over a week now. First, upgrade to WordPress v1.5 and then make sure you have Spam Karma v1.19.

I just installed SK and followed your highly detailed installation instructions to the letter. When I go to the options page, I get this at the top:

WordPress database error: [The used table type doesn't support FULLTEXT indexes]
ALTER TABLE `wp_comments` ADD FULLTEXT KEY spamk_fulltext (comment_content)

I have checked the permissions for the folders. I am running WP 1.5 release version, Win2K Adv. Server, mySQL 4.1.

Thanks!

Thanks for all your hard work on SK, macmanx! I anticipate the thrill of seeing it munch away at those little spammers.

Comments are open for business!Les commentaires sont ouverts

Thanks to DrDave and his spamkarma plugin, I have been able to re-open comments without fear of having to moderate an insane number of them. Wordpress is quite good, but it still takes time to delete hundreds of comments.

So there you go, have fun w…

Help!

I’ve sucessfully installed Spam Karma, but when I bring up the Spam Karma page from the Options menu, it takes a very long time and then I get the following error:

Auto-updating Blacklist Table.

Populating WP-Blacklist Table from: ‘http://www.unknowngenius.com/blog/blacklist/’

ERROR: Could not download from this Blacklist URL.
Populated WP-Blacklist table: imported 0 values, skipped 0 duplicates.

Error: did not import anything…

This also happens when I manually try and update the Blacklist.

It’s installed correctly and I can set and update options accordingly.

Elgin raises an excellent issue here, especially in light of the IP-spoofing ways of comment spammers. This is one of the reasons that I only ban IPs for the repeat offenders.

Elgin, I would recommend that you change ISPs if at all possible. It will solve your problem, and your money will no longer be going to support a company that houses known spammers but refuses to do anything about it.

Hi,

Thanks everybody for the kind words, and sorry for the lack of response: I’m unfortunately too busy right now to do much else than the bare minimum with SK. But I also have started (slowly but surely) work on SK2, which will be mostly recoded from the ground up, and should bring some major improvements.

Anyway, regarding the last few comments:

- the SQL error you might get after installing is normal and absolutely minor: you can safely ignore. Stems from a last minute change in WP 1.5’s SQL schema.

- no way to recover deleted spam other than manually re-entering them (SK gives you all the data you need in the digest, including post ID). That will change with SK2.

- always make sure you test the captcha page (using the special link in the options) and *disable* it if it’s not displayed properly. There are multiple reasons it might not show correctly, but they require some heavy reworking of the Captcha class I’m using, I’ll probably rewrite it entirely for SK2.

- Not much can be done about notification mails being sent for deleted spams. It’s mostly a WP architecture issue…

- generally speaking, SK1 is only mildly efficient on TB (it wasn’t planned as a TB filter), but might easily be overzealous on comments. Overall, I recommend trying to set it on “lenient”, unless it lets too many spams through. Disabling RBL filters will also lower the number of false positive a great deal.

Finally:

- Elgin: there are many times where I’m truly annoyed at the false positives SK can raise (especially with RBL filters), and where I will do my best to fix them in the next version. Your case, I must say, definitely do not belong to them. I am really sorry, but there is no way I would start trying to differentiate between “nice users” and “bad users” of an ISP widely known as a spammer’s lair. The fact that you are aware of it only makes it worse. It is part of your responsibility to choose an ISP with a proper attitude toward the internet community.
Let me put it that way: if you were knowingly sharing your car with a notorious criminal who uses it to rob banks, would you be surprised when you get stopped by the police?
But regardless, the issue comes down to the fact that it would make my life incredibly harder and Spam Karma much weaker, if I had to restrain it when dealing with known spamming server.
This also goes for lots of the irate people who have been contacting me (btw, emailing me a crude insult message about a comment of yours that was eaten somewhere else by SK, is very unlikely to be even dignified by an answer): I am sure there are lots of unjustified false positives out there, but there are also lots of people who show up on RBL blacklists because, oh surprise, they happen to be running a Trojan or an open proxy on their machine, unbeknownst to them. Certainly a shame, but it is definitely not my job to help these people.

Anyway, good luck everybody and let’s hope for SK2 soon enough…

Hi, same problem of #3 and #7 comments, greetz.

Dave, I just upgraded to the latest version by overwriting all the files and now all of my posts say that comments are closed. Did I mess something up? Have you heard of this before? I checked my settings in WP and it is set to allow comments. The posts with comments already made are still open though.

netbloke, the captcha_temp directory should go in the spam-karma folder. I had another version on my old wp 1.2 and i looked and there it was! I just copied it over. I’m not sure it will work, but we shall see soon enough. I would just create a folder of that name in your spam-karma directory. There were a number of images created in there, but I think those are created automatically. Email me if you need them.

Hi,
I AM NO SPAMMER!! really. I even tried to to use a site, which had spam karma… Maybe I did the misatke to write 2 post inbetween some minutes – who ever: I have now no more chance to write comments (like 320 other users of the site )… tzzz! There where lots of errors in line xyz and many affords.

I’m a little concerned about the public viewability of export-blacklist.php. It seems to me that the spammers could link to everybody’s export-blacklist.php, which would cause them to get indexed, and all the URLs that we blacklist would suddenly get a huge increase in page rank. Not what we’re aiming for at all.

Great work, it works excellent. Kill the pokerkneus

Today I installed the latest SK. I can not post a comment at all. I have tried disabling every option and clearing the blacklist. What happens is after posting a comment I just get redirected back to the post. The comment does not appear. When investigating what SK is doing I found that the comment does not appear in the digest. The only place the comment appears is in the WP database marked as spam. I have tried reinstalling SK with both a one-click and manual. I don’t have a clue on where to go from here. Is this a bug anyone else is experiencing?

Spam Karma

I have to report that I think I’ve finally (touch wood) got a handle on the comment spam. It is all due to the very awesome Spam Karma plugin for Wordpress. Since I installed it a week ago (and removed those word-picture things that were so annoying) …

I just had to disable spam karma because I realized that it was eating all comments on my blog. I’m running 1.5 with a couple of fixes. Thanks.

Hello people…

As you will have noticed, no news or support in a while. This for a reason: I have spent the best of my time, for the past two weeks, working on what should quite possibly bring the spam problem to a definitive end.

You think Spam Karma is nice but kinda suck on many counts? So do I… Which is why I rewrote it from the ground up, and with many, many major improvements on the way. Expect to be seriously blown away when it’s finished.

In the meantime: Here is something for ya…

Are you on Dreamhost? They disabled php from opening, including or otherwise using a remote file using a URL rather than a local file path. That would include updating the blacklist.

Mog, you’re a little bit mixed up on what DreamHost did. I’m on DreamHost and have no problems importing the blacklist. What DreamHost did was they blocked local PHP scripts from calling remote PHP scripts. This is honestly essential for security and I can’t think of a single legitimate script that would do something like that.

I’m also getting what Jason and Anuj are seeing with Captcha test page:

-Captcha-Debug: Check given TrueType-Array! (1)
-Captcha-Debug: Valid TrueType-files: (0)No Truetypefont available for the CaptchaClass.

Any idea at least what the problem is? Is this one of the things that probably will be fixed in the Captcha rewrite for 2.0?

I just want to say that SK is absolutly amazing! I am running a test site that I haven’t linked to, yet has been getting hammered by comment spam. So far, not one single comment spam has squeaked through the cracks, SK has nailed them all. So far 551!

I was a little leary at first, but now that I have seen it in action, I’m very impressed! Way to go Dr. Dave! Keep up the great work!

hey i put a comment on a sitee but have been prevented from leaving a message. i have not pamming software on mycomputer and your program if i may say SUX! hav a nice day but people dont use this joke of a proggy

After an unfortunate experience with SK a few months ago where it went beserk and deleted every single comment that anyone tried to post, I’ve reinstalled my blogging software and selectively restored my database. Now, SK works like a dream on my blog and the other three blogs I host.

Owen, It’s very possible that the site that you tried to leave the comment at has the settings to SK one too high. The default settings are more than adaquite to stop the real spam and let normal comments go through.

I have the defaults set and have had only one false-positive. Even that one did get through, they had to “post” it a couple of times, but it finally when through. It’s possible that the message went through a proxy server that was flagged by as bad. Her post did get through. Amusingly enough, it was Anil Dash that was trying to leave the comment.

The test site I mentioned earlier has zapped well over 1,000 spams now. I’m very pleased about that. SK is doing an awesome job over there.

In the long run though, we as blog readers/commenters are going to have to get used to the idea that the site owner is going to do everything in their power to stop spammers from taking the “fun” out of blogging. If it were not for software like SK and RK, I would probably have shut down my site last year. Not that it would be a great loss or anything like that.

A sad note now. Out of 1408 comment spams squashed, one managed to sneak pask SK and fortunatly into the moderation queue. I’m kind of surprised since it was similar to the hundreds I get a day. I can’t explain why that one lowly comment spam got past SK, but one out of over 1,400 are pretty good odds!

awesome plugin. thank you!

Spam Poison doesn’t stop comment spam, it only scares off some bots. If I were you, I’d get rid of Spam Poison (most bots recognize it now and skip by the link), and keep Spam Karma active.

Do you have plans to implement character deformation too? I’d like to see them go even further with more control to the blog owner: enter only the odd numbers in this image, only the first three, skip the fourth, and include the fifth. Since my blog caters to a known group of people I’m not concerned with ostracizing the visually impared. As such I would also like to see color options: enter only the blue and red characters. Perhaps a variation like: enter only the numbers before the second 9.

here is where the enemy stands
http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/default.aspx?vDir=aicaptcha

Since upgrading to version 1.20 I’m getting a lot of false positives – people who have posted on my blog before being blocked. Something is seriously wrong as most of the people who used to comment seem to have been stopped by SK – I’m downgrading to 1.19, if not I’ll have to grit my teeth and deactivate it and deal with Spam manually – I can’t have 1 false positive, let alone 3.

For anyone like Anuj et al. above who have been having problems updating the blacklist automatically: I’m not really clear on what the problem is (and DrDave hasn’t replied?) but it’s something to do with your PhP configuration, I think. A workaround is to download the file yourself, save it in your wp-content directory (as, say, blacklist.txt) then give a direct link to this file as the URL to get the blacklist from (e.g., http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/blacklist.txt). You’ll have to update the file manually every so often, but at least it works…

Strangely, though, when I try and uncheck the “Update automatically…” option for the blacklist, Spam Karma switches it back on, and resets the number of days to 30. This might just be me though!

If anyone’s got a better workaround, I’d love to hear it I can’t find anything in the documentation, unfortunately – or at least, me and Google can’t.

DUDE…I do not like being accused of Spam Karma KRAP.Do you have an address
where I CAN PERSONALLY SHOW YOU HOW MUCH YOUR PUNK ASS IS WRONG!!!
Of course not…you will waste peoples time and aggravate them at your liesure….GET ME OFF YOU FUCKING LIST PUNK and dont make me come back here again. TRUST that

It really amuses me that people post complaints about their comments being considered spam when they write the way they do. Misspellings, ALL CAPS… It’s no wonder…

Seeing this person’s website, I’m not the least bit surprised.

troll…
[drD. note: refers to a comment that was removed ever since]

OK, first off, everybody who’s not yet been checking into it: if you run WP 1.5 and are not running SK2 yet, *you should*. It’s not yet perfect, and unfortunately, you still have to patch WP yourself to fix a nasty bug (been fixed in 1.5.1, released soon), but it’s all rather straightforward and documented in great details here:
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/dev/

I believe SK2 should bring back the level of false positive as close to zero as humanly possible (although from reading some of the comments above, it’s not like such a bad thing all the time).

Owen Beith: I don’t wanna sound harsh, but that’s kind of a basic of blogs. You comment at the bottom of a post in a comment form, and it appears in the comments. I had nothing to do with it, it was entirely automated. I’ll remove both comments if you wish. I haven’t answered mainly for two reasons: 1) there’s little I can do. SK1 generates false positives (a reasonably low number): that’s life and a risk that is taken by people who install it. 2) I have been quite busy both trying to live my life *and* actually working on improving that condition, to such an extent in fact that the final version of SK2 should solve the problem of false positives completely…

All I can say is that you should contact the blog admin (through email) and have him restore your comment (it’s not completely erased, it does appear in a digest he receives at regular interval). Then you should strongly advise him to upgrade to Spam Karma 2.

Tyler: yes, this is a small compatibility issue between SK1 and WP 1.5: it shouldn’t affect your program at all…

Leo: congratulations (on many counts):
1) You have just become the official first real troll of Unknowngenius.com and the first comment ever (spam aside, of course) to be removed manually from this blog. I did so, not because of your fucking language (see, I can use big words too), but because it was simply too embarrassing a statement to the average level of stupidity of the Internet at large. Your comment devoid of any non-hysterical content, failing to make up for the absolute rudeness of its tone, it’s been trashed.

2) And guess what? as a special reward for your immature behaviour, you have lost all replying right to this comment on this blog. Sucks, huh? And next time you see a “Comment denied” while attempting to post here, do not blame SK: it’s only following orders, and the fact that you have just inaugurated my first manual entry to the blacklist.

Overall, consider yourself lucky: a lesser man than me would have probably added you to the central blacklist that is being downloaded regularly by all SK users on the blogosphere. Then you would have had a good reason to be pissed off.

Dave,
We both now this is definitely not an option, and joke aside, I should probably use the occasion to make it very clear to any SK user that whatever little addition to the Blacklist I make (or any other filter settings that may be tweaked to do my evil bidding), it is in no way my role to take position on anything else than pure unambiguous spam.

For anything else, rest assured that SK is absolutely apolitical, and, since after all they do happen to be covered by free speech, it does not even discriminate against morons (tempting as it may be).

Had I have evidence that this gentleman (and I use the term quite loosely here) was indeed widely abusing comment areas all over the blogosphere to serve his own interest, it would be a different matter.

For now, I’ll simply stress once more Leo’s rather thin grasp on both reality, common sense, manners and English grammar. And invite everybody to actually click on his link and check out his site for a laugh (warning; you might wanna turn the speakers down, for when the heavy metal christian rock starts blaring in).

Thanks you for your comment, Dr Dave, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to me that the Nasty Spammer comment I was replying to was part of the blog rather than a direct link to the administrator of whatever Spam Karma was.

And I certainly sympathise with Leo – I think the first point of reference is the offensive little message that Spam Karma sends to the victim rather than the ill-tempered and understandably ill-considered reponse it evokes. Until that is dealt with self-righteous pontification should be kept on the back-burner. Somebody chooses to call me a troll for my comment. All I can do is express solidarity with fellow-trolls and suggest that comments on manners apply equally to those who provoke the outbursts objected to.

Owen, if you were “subscribed” to this posts comments, you would have seen the trollish comment that Leo posted to incure such a title of troll. It was later removed and the “troll” comment is out of context. Maybe drDave should have simply “edited” the comment that Leo posted in order for the comment to have stayed between your post and the “troll” comment.

As to the wording of the message SK gives out when it thinks it has detected spam… I agree. It should be worded more to give the commenter the benifit of the doubt. Something similar to what is displayed in Referrer Karma wouldn’t be bad.

However, I suspect that drDave gets way more comment spams than my test site gets (over 3,000 so far) and if it weren’t for SK, I would be spending way too much time dealing with them.

Since 99% of comment spams are posted by bots, it does seem that the message should be worded more on the side of a mistake rather than an ill will message.

Acutally, the fact that you Owen and Leo “are” able to post comments here is a strong indication that the site you are trying to post at is the problem not SK. I found that site owners often get a little over zelious with their SK setting and set them to be way more sensitive than they need to be. I was being flagged as a spammer earlier on until the sites adjusted their settings.

Try emailing these sites and asking their owners to adjust SK’s settings back to default. I haven’t had any comment spam get through based on the default settings. I suspect Leo will still have problems as sites are probably blocking him outright. That is if he posts comments like the ones he posted here. Owen, you seem to be a fairly reasonable person. I am suspecting that with you, it’s something else. SK gives reasons for it’s rankings. Ask the sites you are having problems with to send you the logs of your attempts. Posting those here would help to determine what was causing the false-positive.

I was blocked from replying to a War on Freedom post, to wit:

[dr dave's note: removed completely off-topic comment. Please see comments above regarding false positives.]

—
I … don’t see why any of that should have been blocked? Please advise.

Hey, this programme keeps eating my posts to my friend’s blog! What the hell is wrong?

Anti comment spam on WordPress

剛剛到 ijliao 長輩的 Blog 晃, 發現他那邊的 recent comments 又爆了….XD
我偷拍一份, 希望長輩別打我……orz

我順便用這篇講一下我這裡在用來防止 comment spam 的 plugin 好了.

我之前曾經看過 gsli…

Spammer has found a way to attack my “reset digest” button. Now when I click on “reset digest” it goes to one of their viagra whatever ads. Any ideas?

i’ve never sent or been involved with sending of SPAM, and to have a message blocked from a site by DR DAVES SPAM FILTER insinuating I have “been identified as a nasty comment spammer by Spam Karma” and, as such, (MY) comment deleted. Is not only slanderous it goes to libel and whoever this DR. DAVE is he’s got some serious apologizing and explaining to do and I expect and intend to get it.

anyone see anything nasty about the following message blocked by Dr. DAVE

[DdV's Note: Removed wholly out of place sample comment]

I am curious how I ended up being blocked. A little.

To Everybody subscribed to comments on this entry:
Sorry for the incredibly long off-topic copy-paste. The content of which had long been posted in its own dedicated entry long ago (actually, it does say so in the mail itself, but I guess Mr. BC is still laboriously working on reading the first two sentences and might take a while before he reaches that part). Feel free to go over there and see for yourself, if you are really bored at the office today and have nothing better to do… But please don’t feed too much candies to the troll, he’s nervous enough as it is.

To BC,

Your insistence at showing every single reader of this site how much of a nitwit you are is laudable. Really, I think it’s cute. But as I already said twice (and I’ll add it once more, because I gather you have difficulties comprehending even the most basic concepts): there really wasn’t any need for it. I made sure to share the laughs with my beloved readers and the world at large, waaay before you had the idea. Let me give you the URL, once again:
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/archives/2005/04/17/angry-emails/

Please write this URL down on a post-it by your monitor, because this is where I’d appreciate you leave any and all future samples of these unintelligible aggregate of letters and punctuation you seem to like engaging in writing and that, for the sake of simplicity, we will call ‘comments’. You will see, it’s quite a nice entry, there’s even a public there too, delighting in your moronic antics. The litter is fresh, I just changed it this morning, so please feel free to take your dumps there, if you must.

Bear in mind though, that while I like meself a good hairy backwood troll (especially one that makes up for his obvious lack of wits by an unusual feistiness), I also tend to tire quickly of sterile discussions where I’m all too painfully aware that the total impression of my words on you can be summed up by the whooshing sound they make, as they fly high above your head. To put it in a language you might have a better shot at grasping: you are kinda entertaining, but don’t wear out your welcome.

Now, I’m gonna remove that IP ban I had to plug on your commenting diarrhea a second ago (btw, like the new SK2 deny message? I hope you do, because not many people get to see it… unless that is, they’ve been manually added to the blacklist), but if you keep yourself pet in your own entry, and attempt to comment here once again, I’ll have no qualms about ridding us all of your inopportune presence on this blog for good. So be a good girl and nobody gets hurt.

When I upgrade the blog to WP 1.5, I upgraded SK to 2.0. Put me on the list as a very satisfied customer. I truly appreciate the efforts you’ve made to enable us to combat spam.

Most of my attacks recently have been trackback spam, and SK 2.0 has stopped them in their tracks.

Wonderful! Thanks!

Wow, it’s never been said we’ve refused Gin money, here at Dr Dave Software Inc.
Tip jar is right this way. But please, read the attached comments, because I mean it.

Also, for anybody who likes SK and feels like giving something back to the community, there are (and will be) many opportunities to use doc-writing, debugging and any other skills you feel you could contribute in any amount.

I will add more info on that, but a quick and easy way to start on this, if you are using SK2 (and you should), is to go have a look at the Wiki: http://wp-plugins.net/wiki/index.php/SK2 and add whatever you see fit… If we all spend a few minutes on this, we can et a kick-ass doc together, in time for the first “official” release of SK2…

Cheers everybody!

There should be a forum to discuss this or something, this page is way to long.

A forum or a wiki would be a great idea. If I weren’t so busy already, I’d volunteer to help maintain it myself.

One problem I have been having is that I am getting moderation notification emails about comments that Spam Karma has “eaten”. The notification message has all of the fields empty as if it was deleted (which it was). How do I stop these notification messages… d

I haven’t seen that since updating to 2.0. I used to get those all the time!

I forgot to list my version. It’s 1.2 (alpha 2) about a month old.

Spam Karma 2: Why Can’t Everything Work This Well?

I had to write a post on the excellent job Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma 2 does at blocking virtually all kinds of blog spam. If you have a WordPress blog and don’t have SK2, you need it. After Google upped my PR from a goose egg to a 3, I got nailed wit…

WordPress Upgrade

WordPress has released an upgrade to version 1.5.1. I updated my site last night and it took all of 15 minutes to do so. All my hacks should be intact, including the RSS hack for the comment count and the extended text notification. While I was a…

There’s a plugin written by Matt Read that will do just that for SK2. It’s available at: http://mattread.com/archives/2005/03/spam-karma-2-stats/.

You should probably remove the old line from your template (although if you used exactly what I gave, it won’t cause any problem, but at any rate it’s no longer useful).

To remove Spam Karma, deleting the plugin files is more than enough.
If you absolutely want to remove all traces of Spam Karma (although they do not impact your install in any way), you can always edit your mySQL DB and remove any mention of ’sk_***’ (’sk2_***’ for SK2) in the options table. This should do it (and no reason your DB will fail to validate if you do that properly), but once again, this is way overkill: leaving this unused option field in your DB after you disable/remove SK will not affect your install in the slightest.

I’m a little concerned about the public viewability of export-blacklist.php. It seems to me that the spammers could link to everybody’s export-blacklist.php, which would cause them to get indexed, and all the URLs that we blacklist would suddenly get a huge increase in page rank. Not what we’re aiming for at all.

mierkols: the urls on the export view are not linked, and the format is not even HTML. As such the spammers would not benefit from Google indexing these pages in any way.
Regardless, this feature was removed from SK2 (it might be replaced by another way of sharing blacklist, if the situation really warrants it).

Bob: as usual, sorry and please read:
http://www.unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/false-positives/

Your ridiculous filter does not work, it merely censors free speech. I can’t quote what other people have said or use normal language using this piece of … (as if it would let me)

I second Jason. I got so much spam when I started using WordPress that I had to install Spam Karma before my sanity went out the window. After letting through about three spam comments it has been faultless, with only one false positive in over 5 months. It’s great!

Spam Karma 2 and Spammer

Baru update Spam Karma dari web ini.
Ternyata ada versi yang baru buat WP 1.5.1.1
Namanya Spam Karma 2.0 beta.
Lebih banyak featurenya dari Spam Karma 2.0 alpha.
Option pagenya juga lebih detail dibanding version sebelumnya.
Spam karma yang sebelumny…

More info that should have beeen included…

The spams are getting thrown into the ‘Awaiting Moderation’ folder. That is probably why they are not oficially counted as ‘eaten’ . These are the same online gambling ones from before that were ‘eaten’ with SK1. I have my settings on the default ones. Do I simply need to change the “General settings” to “kinda mean”? Or any other settings?

TIA,
AB

You rock Dave. Come back, we miss you.

Hello Dave i’ve used your plugin for some time now. so far so good. But yesterday t when users want to comment your plugin give the following singals :
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /data/members/paid/m/a/mazalien.nl/htdocs/www/weblog/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_second_chance.php:2) in /data/members/paid/m/a/mazalien.nl/htdocs/www/weblog/wp-content/plugins/wp-last-visit.php on line 143

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /data/members/paid/m/a/mazalien.nl/htdocs/www/weblog/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_second_chance.php:2) in /data/members/paid/m/a/mazalien.nl/htdocs/www/weblog/wp-content/plugins/wp-last-visit.php on line 203

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /data/members/paid/m/a/mazalien.nl/htdocs/www/weblog/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_second_chance.php:2) in /data/members/paid/m/a/mazalien.nl/htdocs/www/weblog/wp-content/plugins/wp-last-visit.php on line 226

Kind-a-Captcha

Simply copy the code below and and click on submit. (Not much of a captcha, yea, I know… Don’t worry sweetheart, the real thing’s coming soon).

What could cause this problem ?

My website is http://www.mazalien.nl/weblog/

Thanks for the support. Greetings

Here’s a solution — and it’s all about karma: You should post the names and/or companies who participate in blog spam on my site, AssCancerList.com. It’s a GREAT way to get even – wait til that person “Googles” himself and there he is on the Ass Cancer List. A permanent, public record!Hahahahhahaha. Sweet revenge! Brings “Google Bombing” to a whole new level.

still want a free GMail account?

hit me at Expozilla@Gmail.com

The only way anyone could NOT like Spam Karma would be if they weren’t getting spam comments. It’s dealt with 1500 for me in less than 6 months – deleting them manually would NOT have been funny.

[...] If the Spam Karma system was giving you a hard time when you tried to submit your insightful comments, then please try again — I’ve just lovered the overall strictness setting to “normal”. [...]

[...] I have installed Spam Karma 2 on this system in hopes to fight the spam. If you encounter that you somehow cannot write a comment or leave a trackback and you think you should be able to, please consider contacting me on an IM or in e‐mail. This shouldn’t occur, of course.    [...]

[...] No time to make sense out of all this because the buggers are gaining on me! It was time to download Spam Karma 2 and turn it on. [...]

Hi Dr Dave
While in WP admin panel and checking SPK 2.0 pre-alpha 9 I got like a pop up message saying there is a new version of SPK and listing changes. It then disapeared!!! I looked again and again but no it had disapeared. Did I imagine this ??
No matter what I do I can not recreate this. currently on SPK 2.0 pre-alpha.
Please tell me I am not going mad?

[...] 自從好久以前裝了 spam-karma v1 就再也沒有 spam 出現, 最近我整個版面, 系統修改了不少, 所以順道過去 spam-karma 的網站看看, 才知道 spam-karma 2.0-beta 已經出了, 那就順道升一下版本好囉 :p [...]

[...] ok, the wordpress 1.5 upgrade went nice and smooth. I’ve also installed spam karma and need to configure it a bit more friendly as it seems to moderate pretty heavily and has blocked a friend of mine. I’ll be working on the configuring, if you happen to get flagged, you should still be able to post with the captcha (image authorization) please do and let me know if you are experiencing any difficulty… thanks…. scratch that…. went back to kittens spaminator, it doesnt do as much as spam karma does, but until I can configure it so that my visitors dont lose their comments, I’ll have to forego using it. I greatly appreciate all my readers, yes all 3 of you… [...]

[...] spam-karma is not only functioning, it’s pretty robust. so if you can’t post because my site accuses you of being a spammer, please email me and let me know so i can: i) better moderate the plugin, and ii) prevent your IP form being blacklisted. DO NOT resend your comment in the hope that it’ll get through if you just try hard enough: that’ll get your IP blacklisted. [...]

[...] ahhhh … the sweet smell of spam-free blogging. thanks, unknown genius, for spam karma! [...]

[...] Spam Karma [...]

[...] Ja, det s�g du ju. Skriv g�rna n�t om det. Jag har uppgraderat WordPress och lagt in spamfiltret Spam Karma, och lite annat. [...]

So don’t beat me up over it but i still use wordpress 1.2 and can not currently upgrade. I do however need a good spam filter and contorler. I am excited about Spam Karma 1 and appreciate the fact that it wont be updated or supported, but i would really like it to still be available. The download link on http://wp-plugins.net/ dosen’t work. I bet this is low on your priority list but i would really, really love a version of this if anyone can help. If you could fix the link that would be great of if someone could direct me to a new one or send me the file i would also be really happy.

Hi Ben and Agree With Ben:

Sorry, but I have finally completely removed the SK1 archive, as it was no longer effective in any way against spam and only detrimental to legit users (which in turn generated way too many angry complaint mails).

If you have no way of updating WP to at least 1.5, then I would recommend checking on http://wp-plugins.net for other anti-spam options that work on WP1.2. I have recently gone over the different anti-spam stategiesout there and their efficiency… Feel free to have a look and pick a plugin (maybe captcha?) that will do a much better work than SK1 could have ever done…

Cheers and good luck!