Wordpress: Blog comments disabled but comment spams still happen

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on August 12th 2013 - Listed in Internet CMS Wordpress Rant

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Spamming through blog comment forms increased sharply over the past few years. Since the "web 2.0" allows visitors to leave comments or to participate in publishing content, automated bots were programmed to use this method to send spams.

World's most used blog software is probably Wordpress and such bots have an interest to use the comment forms of Wordpress for spamming. Luckily the comment form can be disabled on each post or generally on all posts by simply disabling comments.

However this doesn't mean that comments are generally disabled. Especially if you use attachments (e.g. for a picture gallery), then on each attachment page the comment form will re-appear. I just checked the web access logs of a Wordpress hosting and quickly found the source of spamming:

grep POST access.log
205.164.24.90 - - [12/Aug/2013:09:15:39 +0200] "POST /wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 302 - "http://www.example.com/?attachment_id=206" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)"
205.164.24.90 - - [12/Aug/2013:09:15:41 +0200] "POST /wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 403 4183 "http://www.example.com/?attachment_id=207" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)"
205.164.24.90 - - [12/Aug/2013:09:15:42 +0200] "POST /wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 403 4183 "http://www.example.com/?attachment_id=169" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)"
205.164.24.90 - - [12/Aug/2013:09:15:42 +0200] "POST /wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 403 4183 "http://www.example.com/?attachment_id=198" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0;

A quick search on the big G for "Wordpress disable comments on attachments" presented me a simple yet perfect solution: The Wordpress plugin "Disable Comments".
Once I installed the plugin, the comments could be disabled for the whole website, which was wanted by the website's owner.

Side note: This plugin should only be used when you really want to disable all comment possibility everywhere on the website, as written in the plugin description.

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