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WordPress Pingback SPAM

I’ve been getting tons of WordPress pingback spam. Pingbacks are a little wordpress notification that will tell you when some other wordpress user links to your blog. It tries to pop into your comment section. This is great unless you are me. I get 20 spam pingbacks a day. By default they are allowed on your blog, so all of my old posts had them available. Soooo, to remedy this, I wrote a little SQL query that turns off these pingbacks.

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status = "closed";

Happy blogging peoples!

Comments

10 responses to “WordPress Pingback SPAM”

  1. omega-00 Avatar
    omega-00

    For anyone else wondering, if you’re starting out a new blog there an option to turn them off from the getgo.

    Just head to Settings -> Discussion -> “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)” (and untick that).

    Of note, I’ve linked to your blog a couple of times, both in twitter posts and on blogs I post on 🙂

    How many hits do you get a day? You must be nearly famous on the internet by now.

    *me wants a gregsowell-fan-club badge* 😛

  2. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Yep, you are 100% correct Andrew. If I had just done that in the beginning, I would have saved myself a bit of trouble. I don’t get nearly that many hits a day 🙂 I have friends that average in the thousands of hits per DAY . I average over 500 a day…I get somewhere around 14K a month.

    I’m going to run off a bunch of tshirts for the next state’s side MUM, free swag! 🙂 If I stick some up on cafepress, you going to grab one? hehehehe

  3. Jimmy Avatar
    Jimmy

    Pinging gregsowell.com [209.189.228.152] with 32 bytes of data:

    Reply from 209.189.228.152: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=61
    Reply from 209.189.228.152: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=61
    Reply from 209.189.228.152: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=61
    Reply from 209.189.228.152: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=61

    Oh, wait, thats not what you meant.

  4. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Oh how I’ve missed these horrendous jokes…:P

  5. Jimmy Avatar
    Jimmy

    You put up with me only because of the traffic I send you. Sort of a love – hate relationship I would guess.

  6. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    I do love to hate you 😉 hehehehe

  7. EtherealMind Avatar
    EtherealMind

    Greg

    I’m not having this problem. I’m using the Akismet spam plugin from wordpress which seems catch almost all spam in pingbacks and comments and was wondering if you were using that as well.

  8. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Greg,

    I’m honored…not too frequently a celebrity comments 😉

    I currently use SI CAPTCHA as my spam filter, but it does nothing for my pingback spam. I’ve also noticed that in my 1 year + of blogging I’ve really only gotten one or two pingbacks…soooooo I’m just going to dump them like James at the Jr prom. The guy sitting next to me gets that reference. Or perhaps a bowl of oatmeal after 6 cups of coffee (thanks for that one Jacob).

  9. Karen @ Pledging for Change Avatar
    Karen @ Pledging for Change

    Phew. I was wondering what was happening with all the sites sending the pingbacks to my site. I was checking through by visiting thier sites and found on many that they had add complete lists of “related posts”. When you check the blog post itself the “related” posts on other sites have no relevence whatsoever.
    Just another automated pingback spam thing to ruin what was (at the time) a very good idea.

  10. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    @Karen,

    It is frustrating at best! Spam is my constant companion…they will always find a way it seems.

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