Hi guys

Somthing major seems to have happened with Php fox in the last few days, as people are reporting their sites being inundated by lots of blog spam, lots of new people registering with various ip addresses.

Thought I would do a post on how best to try to stop this spam from China.

Of course you could just disable your site for now, but for me thats not an option.  So heres what ive tryed up to now, I seem to have stopped most of it.

1) Akismet – You need to enable your akismet, this will pick up most of the blog spam.

- Goto akismet.com
- Scroll down the screen a bit and click where it says, we have free api keys for your personal blog.
- Put in your email address and it should give you some details, leave this screen open or copy and paste them somewhere.
-  Go into your Phpfox admin and go to the spam section, the akismet settings are at the top of this page.
-  It will ask you for your Akismet URL:
- Type in this field w w w.yoursite.com (obviously without the spaces in the www)
-  Goto the next field down and it will ask for your Akismet Password
-  Now go back to your akismet settings you just registered at their site, and you need to put the akismet api key you were given, into this 2nd field.
-  Its 12 characters and alphanumeric!
-  Now any spam that it picks up will show in admin under dashboard, just click the number and it will show the posts, then just delete them.
-  However the odd post still gets through.

You might also want to ban the users, and then ban their ip ranges, you can always remove these at a later date. I have been doing the following:

-  In the dashboard, put in the username of the spammer and click go
-  Scroll down to their name and click the first tab and ban the user.
-  Write down the Ip address.
-  Goto tools, ban filters and ip address from them menus at the top of php fox
-  Type the first 2 bits of the ip address in with a fulls stop after the 2nd number and then add a asterisk which will ban that range, for example 221.12.*
-  Click add.

Its a complete pain but it does seem to be slowly working.

Ive tried enabling recapture and it didn’t make any difference, along with making people confirm their registration.

Please pass on this information and post to others, hopefull we can all beat this.

Steveo