WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer)

IMPORTANT: The plugin described below has not been updated or tested in many years. Use at your own risk.

In my ongoing battle against comment spam, I have finally decided to write myself a WordPress plugin as an additional layer of defense. It’s called WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer).

WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer) is an extremely simple plugin for marking comments as spam if they match certain regular expressions.

DOWNLOAD: wreck.zip
Current Version: 1.0
Release Date: 7/6/2008

INSTALLATION: Just download and copy wreck.php to your plugins folder (wordpress/wp-content/plugins), then activate it in the plugins section of your WordPress blog.

LICENSE: This plugin is open-source (GNU General Public License), but I would appreciate it if you let me know of any modifications you find helpful.

SUPPORT: No formal support is provided, but I will take a look at any requests/suggestions/complaints you send me through my contact form.

NOTES: This plugin is very simple to use, but BE CAREFUL! It uses regular expressions to filter comments, so a badly written regular expression may block legitimate comments.

By default, only one type of comment is blocked: a comment containing only two lines, the first of which is bolded, with an ellipsis (“…”) on each line. The author gets a lot of comment spam like this, which is the reason he wrote this plugin.

If you find this plugin useful, please let me know here. Please also let me know if you discover any useful rules or make any other modifications.

Enjoy!

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Comments

3 responses to “WRECK (WordPress Regular Expression Comment Killer)”

  1. Brian Hinkle Avatar
    Brian Hinkle

    Why don’t you just use Akismet? Just send all comments straight to the moderation queue if they’re not a previously approved commenter, and let it screen out the majority (it works 99.9 pct of the time for me) – if any odd patterns show up that can be easily blocked by regexes, just report them as spam with about two or three clicks and then watch as within hours their system updates to catch that pattern.

    Reply
  2. Ed Avatar
    Ed

    Actually, I do already use Akismet – it just misses around 30 or so comments per day (I get around 200 comment spams per day). So, I get 30 or so emails about approving the same, tired spams (French poker sites and insurance, mostly), every day. I do report the spam to Akismet, but it never seems to update fast enough to make a difference, and it has never adapted to the very simple pattern described above. Akismet is a huge help, to be sure – it catches about 85% of my spam, unaided. This plugin catches another 10% or so. The rest… that’s life.

    Reply
  3. Dan Thies Avatar
    Dan Thies

    Ed, thanks for this, it’s been on my list for a while. I’m guessing I can cut the spam that passes through my other filters in half with this.

    As for Akismet, Brian, we had to give up on that after a week. I get hundreds of spam comments a day, sometimes more than a thousand, and finding the legitimate comments that landed in that giant Akismet bucket (it does happen) was completely impractical.

    Reply

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