Adam R Brown

These charts show when spammers like to attack the most. These charts use averages dating back to January 28th, 2008, when KB Spam Blacklist starting operating on this site. These times are in my server's time zone, where it is currently 9:13 am.

The red line indicates the number of spams stopped, on average, for each hour of each day. The blue line is the same data with smoothing applied (to make the trends more obvious).

Want to shoot spam on site, preventing it from even showing up in your moderation queue? Try out KB Spam Blacklist.

As if there weren’t enough anti-spam plugins, right? Actually, this isn’t a traditional anti-spam plugin. This is a regular-expression based blacklist plugin. And by blacklist, I mean blacklist. If a comment matches one of your regexes, it gets deleted immediately, not sent to moderation.

Why use this plugin?

So why would you want this? I don’t know about you, but 90% of my Akismet spam is really obvious spam. It contains obscenities, BB code ([url...]), “payday loan” offers, and other things that are really obvious. I don’t want this stuff in my spam queue–I want it shot on sight. That way, the spam queue only has stuff in it that might actually be genuine comments that were miscategorized as spam.

How it works

In short, this plugin takes some of the load off of Akismet by looking for really obvious stuff. It’s easy to use. Just activate the plugin–that’s all. It comes with four regular expressions. You can add to, modify, or remove these if you want. This is the default blacklist:

<?php $kb_spamBlacklist = array(
	// First, let's check for [url]...[/url] markup, a sure sign of a spammer (unless you're using a bb code plugin)
	'~\[[^\]]*url[^\]]*\]http[^\[]+\[/url[^\]]*]~i',

	// profanity and obscenity. Remember that spammers use ! for i, @ for a, * for u. 
	// Also, most of these get surrounded in \W so that, e.g. ASSume doesn't get mistaken for profanity.
	'~(\Wf[u\*]ck|x{3,}|\Ws[u\*]ck[i!]ng|\Wt[i!]ts?\W|\W[a@]s{2}\W|v[a@]g[i!]n[a@]|\Wc[u\*]nt|pen+[i!]s)~i',	// depending on your audience, you might not want this one

	// Now let's check for ... interesting ... pharmaceutical offers
	'~(c[i!][a@]l[i!]s|v[i!][a@]gr[i!]?[a@])~i',	// remember that they sometimes use ! for i and @ for a

	// payday loans, anyone?
	'~(credit|loans?).*(credit|loans?).*(credit|loans?)~Usi',	// if they use "credit" or "loans" too many times in their comment, kill it.
); ?>

Try it out

If a comment gets caught by one of those regexes (or by another that you add), the commenter sees an error message. If you want to try it, write a comment that uses viagra, cialis, or [url]http://buy-junk.com[/url] in it and see what happens.

Also includes a widget, if you’re into that. Look in the sidebar.

Download it

Download KB Spam Blacklist v1.0