Prevent Spam Blogs in WordPress MU

Spammers are becoming increasingly annoying and tricky nowadays by using Black Hat techniques to boost their websites’ search engine rankings (usually parked pages with tons of ads, which, in return = $$$).

A Little Background

At first, they targeted free blog hosts like Blogspot and Wordpress with automated blog generating programs to create hundreds of spam blogs at a time. These spam blogs would contain back-links to their websites, which improves their SEO. However, these spam blogs are so common now that they usually get suspended/deleted within 48 hrs or so of creation.

Spammers’ New Targets: WordPress MU

Individual blog hosts using WordPress MU are the spammer’s new targets now. The following is from a Black Hat SEO article:

There is a script available from Wordpress called Wordpress Multi-User (WPMU) that allows you to give your website visitors free Wordpress blogs.
Literally thousands of webmasters have installed this script on their servers.
That’s good news for us. Why? Multiple domains/IPs + free Wordpress blogs = extremely easy backlinks to our websites.

Solution to Prevent Spam Blogs on WordPress MU

Spammers find vulnerable WordPress MU blogs through a simple “Google Hack”. They enter the following search query:

“you’ll be blogging seconds later” inurl:wp-signup.php

This allows spammers to go directly to the doors of WordPress MU sites, enabling them to register spam blogs.

To make it harder for spammer to find your WordPress MU blog, simply edit the wp-signup.php file and remove the line “you’ll be blogging seconds later”. This will make it a lot harder for spammers to find your WordPress MU site and register spam blogs.

Update: just for laughs and to show that spammers are trying hard to make a few cents, I wanted to share this (how kind, they even linked to me!):

http://www.warriorforum.com/internet-marketing-product-reviews-ratings/56475-keith-baxters-traffic-x-launching-feb-16-a.html#post546262

18 Responses to “Prevent Spam Blogs in WordPress MU”

cup beans on February 14th, 2008

I had people reaching me in the same way and sending tons of messages that are just being deleted.
Can’t really understand the point if all the spam is deleted anyway? What do they gain?

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chuks ugoji on February 16th, 2008

Thanks a million for this security alert kind of.Hoping to get more as days run bye.

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John Hok on February 18th, 2008

@cup beans: Most of the times these are mass automated spam processes. Sometimes they past through filters if lucky or if the blog owner misconfigured a setting for their comments.

Every little link back counts for these spammers so it’s done anyways…

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elliot on February 27th, 2008

Spam is a scourge – spamming is useless as the buyer gets put off more often than not….

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michael owen on March 9th, 2008

Thank you. Very good site. respect to author

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Jan the aquarium guy on May 16th, 2008

I will be developing an anti-spam plugin for WP-MU soon. I have my own installation of WP-MU and I recently disabled free registration because Google indexed spam blogs which were created by spammers earlier than I deleted it . Links to some Japanese sex parties are not what I want there.

My anti-spam will use more techniques which will result in less, or even zero, spam. Because even if you renamed your wp-signup file, spammers have their own lists of WP-MU blogs. Say that they find your WP-MU before you rename the file, and they put your URL on their list. Unfortunate.

You can check my current two plugins for WP of course, my nickname is janhvizdak .

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Eastwood on May 20th, 2008

Jan, best of luck with your plugin! Keep me updated with the progress

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courbe de temperature on May 27th, 2008

hi,
any news from this plugin test?
I’m still searching a good one tio prevent spam in WordpressMu

Thanks

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Usepescunse on August 2nd, 2008

It’s amazing

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Khan on September 29th, 2008

@ Eastwood Zhao

Nice tip, i have tried it a while ago and hope it would stop it for a while,if not for long.
just a question, what if we rename the wp-signup file?it would mean that we will have to change it in the whole site.would there be any changes required in the Database?

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Eastwood on October 2nd, 2008

Khan,

I’m guessing that if you were to rename the signup file, the internal structure of WordPress MU would be kinda messed up, since it will be unable to locate the wp-signup file.

If you can change all the links to point to the signup file, back up your site and give it a shot. Not sure if the database has anything to do with it. My guess is that it does. Probably the safest thing would be to leave the file name as it is.

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khan on October 5th, 2008

thanks Eastwood,
i have tried it,but it did’nt help and yes i started facing problems with my site.But i have changed the all the pre given text from Wordpress on the signup page and also used the wordpress admin filter and thanks God, no spam blogs have been created in the last three or four days.

cheers

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Eastwood on October 5th, 2008

Anytime, Khan. Yeah… almost all of these sblogs are automatically generated. So if the spamming bots can’t find your site from Google, chances are that they’ll leave you alone.

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slaed tsacmoc on February 16th, 2009

Just put a captcha or something.

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- Eastwood on February 18th, 2009
  
  We’re talking spam blogs here, not simply spam comments.
  
  Most splog programs allow users to manually input captchas…
  
  Reply
sHyuAn on October 4th, 2009

I have changed all the “wp-signup.php” into other term in wp-signup.php and wp-login.php. so far it has been 4 hours without spam signups.. and i had tried to register a new user to test out the signup after changing the filename, it has no problem as well..

hopefully this really works..

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- sHyuAn on October 5th, 2009
  
  There’s again spam signup today with a gmail. =( There’s no way looks like a real person. Is this possible to be a human spam since it is a gmail (as what wordpress MU website said)?
  
  Reply