How To Deal With Spam in PHPLD

About 4-5 months ago my directory started getting spammed heavily every day and for the 1st 3-4 months it was a real pain in the ass having to go through all of the crap to find the real submissions.

I have recently worked out how to deal with it and not get worked up.

Here is a quick guide to dealing with directory spam, for people who have paid directories and use PHPLD v.3.1.0

1. When you are going to update your directory and approve links go to paypal 1st, click on payments recived.

2. Start at the top or bottom and view details of the 1st transaction, the vast majority of the time it will tell you which URL has been submitted.

3. Go to your PHPLD admin panel, click on approve links and simply search for the URL submitted.

4. Approve or decline the link and approve or decline the payment.

5. Repeat the 1-4 process until you have approved or rejected all of the paid submissions you have received.

6. Go to approve links and delete all of the spam: Instead of deleting the submissions one by one like I was doing for a long time, you do this, scroll down to the very bottom of the screen and in the 'manage multiple sections' category select 'check all' and then click 'remove'.

7. Repeat no.6 until all of the spam is gone.

I just deleted over 450 spam submissions in less then 2 minutes and I actually enjoyed it.

Enabling the spam captcha form on your submission page helps, but it does not fix the problem. Also submitters like our friend Chris hate to use these spam captcha forms and having it enabled could cost you submissions.

 

very informative tutorial.
Thanks.

 

Well ... thx for the insight

As i mentioned not long ago a "mod" that would enable the submitter to
first pay the review fee then enter the info afterwards.
That would end 100% of spam submissions...

An interesting discovery i made a few days ago and shared with an0n was
that every time a directory in our network was spammed there was one same
visitor on all our referral mod stats ... Take a guess who

Coincidence was that the directories that received no spam didnt contain
them in the referral stats log.

thx
malcolm

 

That's pretty much the routine that I follow. It does feel good when you delete the little swines, the only draw back is when you get emailed abuse by rejected submitters ...

 

Who was it Macolm? PM me if you do not want to say.

 

Begins with a G and ends with an e.


btw Dave, are your directories getting spammed? If so, which?
PM me.

 

This may be just a teaser and if it is you got me, but are you seriously saying Google spam anyone?

 

Thank you, spam is the reason I let my directory go.

 

phplinkbid is getting hit hard these days as well

 

Read numerical post #3. It is not my word. It is malcolm's.
I was just told what he thinks he's been seeing.

 

I did, it was your post that added the G and the E! I can see the words co-incidence though which is no doubt what it is.

You know my views on Spam Rob, it can and has been beaten but I'm jumping right back out of this thread to avoid hi-jacking.

Where you been btw? Not seen you about, holiday or just plain busy?

 

Was just relaying a hint of what I was given mention to

Yes, I know. You also know I have several ways to combat it too

[/quote]
Working on a super MOD. bwahahaha.

R

 

Believe it or not Jamie, I get alot of spam on my blog comments and the links are no other but google.com/ax83fj

some ridiculous thing like that. Good thing Akismet keep it away.

 

Anyone who uses wordpress for a blog usually gets spam, I've been part of blogs for 6 years now and never once saw Google send one and find it hard to believe they would.

That's the weakness of akismet, it doesn't let you have access to the headers of the spam, that way if you knew what you were doing you could rip the header apart and look at exactly where the spam originates and I'd bet a million dollars it wouldn't be google directly just someone using their name as such.

I do believe you when you say they appear to come from google but trust me, there's little chance of that happening.

 

Macolm, who was it?

 

That's a lot of spam submissions. It would take about a week to get that many on my directories. Why so many?

 

lol.. what a method, as though anyone deletes them one by one. Anyways, its better to get a spamguard installed than wasting your time on the deletion process.

 

I didn't had problems with spam so far. I am getting like max 5 spams per week and I have decent traffic on my directory.