Anti-spam Patch For b2evolution : Release 1
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 2:11 AM, Tue 03 Jan 06
Filed under: Webapps, Webserving
8 Comments
Unless the spammers have also been enjoying a break from things over the holiday period, the collection of anti-spam additions for b2evolution that I recently put together has been doing a great job. I’ve only had one spammer get through so far - a definite improvement over recent times 
I’ve put together a first release of the antispam patch collection. None of this code is my original work; I’ve just collected these patches from the b2evolution forums and made them available in one, easy-to-apply patch. Full credit for the original authors is included in the README file in the tarball.
Once I’ve caught up with Daniel (who maintains Gentoo’s b2evolution package), I hope to get this patch included as standard on Gentoo. I’d rather resist making this optional; I’m sure everyone using b2evo to run their blog (like all the Gentoo-hosted dev blogs) should have stronger antispam as standard.
I think that there’s still room for improvement. So far, I haven’t seen b2evolution itself do anything with the IP addresses that spam comes from. Blacklisting the IP addresses locally, and submitting them to a central blacklist like bsb.empty.us could be useful. Then, updating the spam recheck, deny access for referer spammers and bad behaviour add-ins to also update the IP blacklists could be very useful The zombie boxes relaying the spam all seem to post a wide range of spam; being able to identify and block them as early as possible may cut down on the spam that does get through.
Now, if only we could actually do something useful about all these zombie boxes that the spam is relayed through …
8 Comments
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:20 am
Is there an akismet plugin for b2evolution yet?
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:22 am
My link to http://akismet.com/ got filtered
January 3rd, 2006 at 9:08 am
Not that I know of, no. It would make a great addition to this hardened patch, tho.
January 3rd, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Just curious.
Is there a reason why you haven’t just moved up to wordpress?
I’m not exactly a fan of the b2 forks, that is, the ones that kept the b2 name (b2++, b2evo, etc.). But of course, that’s just me and to each their own. I’m genuinely curious though, because WordPress is a BEAUTIFUL piece of software IMO…
P.S. I like the customizations you’ve made here, however.
January 3rd, 2006 at 11:08 pm
Hi Jason,
The reason I migrated from Wordpress is, in a word, security. Wordpress has suffered its fair share of vulnerabilities in 2005, and more than once we’ve come very close to punting Wordpress from Gentoo because of concerns about the response from Wordpress developers.
When I switched from Wordpress, it didn’t support the features that b2evo does. Wordpress 2 looks much more competitive on that front.
Best regards,
Stu
January 6th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
As I’m currently working for http://blogg.de, we provide a public black list there which is constantly updated. You can find it on http://spam.blogg.de/blacklist.txt or http://spam.blogg.de/blacklist.xml.
August 12th, 2006 at 11:06 am
good work.
December 17th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
This is one of the best Blog i ever been. Interesting TOPIC.
Thanks
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