General Support: is spam a problem with plogger?

I haven't gotten a single peice of spam on any of my Plogger installations in over a year, but this could probably be attributed to the fact that Plogger is not really that popular compared to some of the better known CMS systems.

It is possible though, and I'm sure as Plogger grows in popularity this may become a problem. Integrating a spam filtering solution is not currently on the roadmap, but may materialize if the need presents itself.

We have put in place basic comment moderation in version 3, but I fear this will be insufficient if the spammers really get going... maybe time to consider a stronger solution.

I'm also getting lots of "viagra" spam on my installations. It seems limited to certain images though and not generally across the board. I wonder if that means someone is using some sort of script.

Moderation will be a nice feature as I'd rather approve something before it goes live on the site. But yes, it can be annoying if you're getting a ton of spam.

oats, please share your solution if its a success on your site.

Nice =)

It seems there is no simple way to just turn off comments, believe it or not.

Except for the "allow user comments" checkbox in the options menu, right?

I implemented oats' temporary fix but also decided that I would like to have a more direct way to delete spam comments all at once rather than going through each collection/album/picture via the manage tab. So I created a new tab called comments by adding the following line to the display function in the admin/plog-globals.php file:

$tabs['comments'] = array('url' => 'plog-comments.php','caption' => 'Comments');

Then I created a file called plog-comments.php in the admin directory that has the following code
<?php
require("plog-globals.php");
require_once("../plog-load_config.php");
require_once("plog-admin-functions.php");

$comments = $_POST["comments"];

$output = '';
if (isset($_POST["submit"])) {
for ($i=0; $i<=$_POST["numcomments"]; $i++) {
if ($comments[$i]) {
$query = "DELETE FROM ".$TABLE_PREFIX."comments WHERE id=".$i;
//echo $query . "<br>";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Some error occurred.");
$comments[$i]="";
}
}
$output .= '<p class="actions">Comments have been deleted.</p>';
}

$date_formats = array(
"n.j.Y",
"j.n.Y",
"F j, Y",
"m.d.y",
"Ymd",
"j-m-y",
"D M j Y");


$i = 0;
$output .= '
<h1>Manage Comments</h1>
<form action="'.$_SERVER["PHP_SELF"].'" method="post">
<div id="comments_section">
<table style="width:550px;text-align:left;font:georgia">
<tr style="background-color:#E8EBF0;">
<td style="border-bottom:1px solid grey; border-top:1px solid grey"><strong>delete</strong></td>
<td style="border-bottom:1px solid grey; border-top:1px solid grey"><strong>author</strong></td>
<td style="border-bottom:1px solid grey; border-top:1px solid grey"><strong>email</strong></td>
<td style="border-bottom:1px solid grey; border-top:1px solid grey"><strong>url</strong></td>
<td style="border-bottom:1px solid grey; border-top:1px solid grey"><strong>date</strong></td>
<td style="border-bottom:1px solid grey; border-top:1px solid grey"><strong>comment</strong></td>
</tr>';

$comments_array = array();
$query = "SELECT * FROM `".$TABLE_PREFIX."comments`";
$result = run_query($query);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$i++;
if ($row["approved"]==1) {
if ($i % 2 == 1) {
$output .= '<tr style="background-color:#eee">';
} else {
$output .= '<tr>';
}
($comments[$i]) ? $checked = "checked" : $checked = "";
$output .= '
<td><input type="checkbox" name="comments['.$row["id"].']" value="1" '.$checked.' /></td>
<td>'.$row["author"].'</td>
<td>'.$row["email"].'</td>
<td>'.substr($row["url"],0,25).'</td>
<td>'.$row["date"].'</td>
<td>'.$row["comment"].'</td>
</tr>';
$numcomments = $row["id"];
}
}

$output .= '
<tr><td colspan="6">
<input type="hidden" name="numcomments" value="'.$numcomments.'" />
<input class="submit" type="submit" name="submit" value="Delete Selected Comments" />
</td></tr>
</table>

</div>';

display($output, "comments");
?>


That's just a quick stab at it and it could no doubt use some improvement, but it seems to work so far so maybe it will help some others as well...

Here are some lines I added to oats code (above, Jul 4 2006) based on spam I have been getting at the rate of a couple hundred a day

|| stristr($comment,'chasemastercard')
|| stristr($comment,'instantbulletin')
|| stristr($comment,'spazioblog')
|| stristr($comment,'harrypotterbook')
|| stristr($comment,'forumsvibe')
|| stristr($comment,'cartierreplica')
|| stristr($comment,'Betty Crocker Cookbook')
|| stristr($comment,'ontheinter')
|| stristr($comment,'creditcardconsolidationloan')
|| stristr($comment,'phpbbnow')
|| stristr($comment,'forum66')
|| stristr($comment,'chasecreditcardonline')

And then, I figured instead of beating around the bush, I also added this:

|| stristr($comment,'http')
|| stristr($comment,'url')

We'll see how it works.

-Dave

Drive002,

Can you not just delete the spam comments under the "Feedback" tab? You should be able to check all the comments you want and click the "Delete Checked" button and they should be deleted (I believe). I think jb's code is pretty much included under the "Feedback" tab now.

Is there a way to increase the number of displayed messages on the feedback tab in the Plogger admin console?
Lets say, increase the maximum entries per page from 50 to 500 for instance?

Awesome! Thanks...
In my version of Plogger the file is actually at admin/plog-feedback.php
However, when I go over 400 entries per page, I get a server error:

" Request-URI Too Large
The requested URL's length exceeds the capacity limit for this server.
request failed: URI too long"

So I had to limit the number to 350 =)