Using Woopra to Combat Comment Spammers
It’s funny what kinds of unintended uses can be discovered for new tools like Woopra. My latest discovery was the fact that you can actually use Woopra to help combat spammers on your site. Here is how I discovered it can work.
First of all, I’m using WordPress over on my personal blog. In the Woopra plugin for WordPress I’ve enabled all of the notification options including “Auto Tagging”, “Show Comments” and “Show Searches”. For a little more detail on what the options do, you might see this previous blog post on the addition of the search tracking feature.
After that, I simply set up a new Event Notification to give me an alert when a Tagged visitor comes to the site. Since I have “Auto Tagging” enabled in the WordPress plugin, any time someone leaves a comment they get tagged, and the next time they visit a page I receive a notification.
The other day I saw a notification pop up that said I had a known visitor on the site by the name of “Spyware Doctor”, which looked very suspicious to me. So, I clicked on the notification to take me directly to the detail listing associated with that visitor. What I saw shocked me!
As you can clearly see, this person was using Google to search my site for the words “spyware”, “malware” and “adware” and then visiting every page that contained that keyword so they could leave a comment.
The reason for this is that they clearly just wanted their spammy keyword name and URL to be on those pages to try and generate traffic back to their Web site. This is one of the most basic tricks in the Blog spam book, but I was surprised at just how clearly Woopra was able to show me what was happening. It leaves no doubt whatsoever about what is going on.
Because I saw the instant notification and took a look at what was going on I was able to immediately delete all of the spammy comments and also blacklisted the user from further commenting on my blog.
If you’ve discovered other interesting Spam fighting techniques or have suggestions as to how we can improve Woopra for use as a Spam fighting tool I hope you’ll share your thoughts with the rest of us.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:44 pm
You should have used the “Start a conversation” feature to tell Mr “Spyware Doctor” to get off your blog. That would have shocked him
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
You’re right! I can’t believe I missed the opportunity to harass them!
John
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Only problem is that a lot of spam comments are generated by bots which generally don’t interact with Javascript, so you never see anything in your hosted stats application (Woopra or otherwise).
However I agree this does work really well for an actual “live person” leaving spam comments.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:32 pm
[...] Woopra » Blog Archive » Using Woopra to Combat Comment Spammers. Written by marshal in: Uncategorized | [...]
December 3rd, 2008 at 5:36 am
Reads nice. In the Plugin i have to insert my API Key. But i can’t find the API Key. Can you give me a hint?
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:28 pm
hi, you can find the key on the members –> my websites, just click edit on the site u need to check the api and its on the bottom with orange font i think
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:19 pm
lol. very topical.
only today Woopra busted someone trying to stir up trouble for us.
should I trust….?
was going to blog about it and just how indispensible Woopra has become soon.
lovin’ your work guys.
December 4th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
I’m excited, everything about Woopra is way vool.
December 5th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Did not think of using Woopra for this… Interesting…
Although on Blogger, I safeguard comments with a Captcha, I do get manual spammers to get through, but moderate comments… So the -once-in-a-while- manual spammer comments, I throw out manually.
P.
December 9th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
That’s an interesting find, that I hadn’t considered. I think the opportunity to try and SPAM the spammer is very appealing. Lately, my blog gets most of it’s comment spam as trackbacks, however, otherwise I’d be giving this a serious shot, if only to try and stick it to the spam!
December 17th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Hello John
Just read the piece in Financial Times and since I have been frustrated with the Stats aspect of Feedburner lately wondered if Woopra would be an option for my blog ‘Serge the Concierge’.
Will it conflict with Google Analytics or any other programs that I have already installed?
Does it work fine with Typepad?
Sorry for all the questions, I am more a practical user than a techie.
Currently taking part in Menu for Hope 5, a Global Blogging Fundraiser for UN World Food Programme.
Serge
‘The French Guy from New Jersey’
December 18th, 2008 at 11:16 am
@ Serge Lescouarnec:
Woopra does not interfere with other Plugins, scripts, or analytics programs. It will work with static HTML and dynamically generated websites, including TypePad. Just use the manual installation method (copy and paste the JavaScript in the footer). Please see the Woopra Installation Guide for more details on installing Woopra.
We are currently not approving new beta testers, but might soon as we have resources available. Thanks for your patience and enthusiasm for Woopra.
January 1st, 2009 at 11:26 am
I just implemented this idea too.. What a great way to see usage. I have several events marked for specific non-members that I need to know what pages their on and how often. This is a great feature!