Comments on: Hiding from spammers

By: Jani

Jani — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:13:03 +0000

I’ve heard from other sources too that removing references to WordPress may reduce spam. It’s just been such a nightmare removing those from all the WordPress installations I’m runnig.

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:50:42 +0000

Thanks for this. I only just started up and I already had to delete loads of spam. I am looking at a few other measure to put in place but this should help to.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 08:43:46 +0000

It is my personal experience that not mentioning WordPress cuts down on the amount of incoming spam. That is the main reason for this plugin.

Of course, if you have “Powered by WordPress” on each page, it probably makes no difference whether you have the generator meta tag or not. Having WordPress mentioned in the content is enough to attract more spam.

Knowing that a blog runs WordPress gives you information about how to attempt spamming. You don’t need to download the page HTML and parse it to find the comment form: it is often located in a “standard” address. You can also use pingbacks and trackbacks without trying to find the URLs for these features (although e.g. pingbacks are advertised in a couple of easy-to-find ways, of course). It seems that many spammers have tools especially crafted to target WordPress. Naturally it makes sense, since WordPress is so popular.

Also, since I had already removed the generator tag in the past, I just didn’t want it back all of a sudden. I try to avoid local modifications to the core WordPress code as much as possible, so all my mods become plugins instead. Writing a plugin is not difficult at all, and one of the best design practices of WordPress is its multitude of hooks for plugins to use.

By: Colin McNulty

Colin McNulty — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:22:15 +0000

This all sounds very interesting, but what you've failed to do is explain exactly why I need a plugin the removes the Generator html? You say it's a target for spam, but I don't really understand that.

If I stick "powered by wordpress" into Google, it claims to give me 12M hits. So it seems to me that a generator meta tag isn't an issue with advertising that you run a wordpress blog. Nor is it an indication that comments are enabled, or that your blog is somehow "spammable".

Having said all that, I'm clearly missing something, as you would not have gone to the effort of writing a plugin that was meaningless. So if you would be kind enough to explain, I would be much obliged.

Many thanks,

By: ceredigion

ceredigion — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:17:27 +0000

I did this a while back but rather than remove it I just changed it completely, also changing things like “add a comment” to being images/ other phrases helps :D