October 21st, 2004

An updated version of the Three Strikes Spam Plugin, now in version 1.1 Beta, is available for download.

I started to receive a few Spam comments yesterday and I realized that the built in WordPress “Common Spam Words” filter does not account for encoded information. In other words, if a spammer encodes the contents of the comment, URL etc, it does not get caught as spam (though some items will get caught). This new version of the plugin uses a function that acts like the Javascript unescape command (in PHP) and decodes encoded entities. The php function, and consequently, the Three Strikes plugin, will check for Unicode and ASCII characters, convert them to plain letters and characters (unencoded) and then run the spam checker on this information. I will be working on implementing this within Kitten’s Spam Words plugin as well.

Download the new plugin from here. Installation and upgrade are as simple as renaming this file as threestrikes.php, copying it to your wp-content/plugins directory and then enabling it within your admin interface. Please post bugs/suggestions.

[EDIT] The offer to share my personal “Common Spam Words” still stands. I have enough words in there to populate Google. 🙂 Email me with requests if you want to use that.

[EDIT] If you want my list of spam words, please include a link to your blog with the request so I know that you are not a spammer.

[EDIT] Now with Trackback checking built in. To update, just download the plugin again and re-upload to your blog.

About the Author

Mark Ghosh

An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.

Web: https://weblogtoolscollection.com

Michael Moncur says:

10/22/2004 at 12:57 am

Why not count the encoding itself as a spam indicator? There’s no reason for normal commentors to encode characters.

Edlef says:

10/22/2004 at 12:46 pm

Great plugin!! I think Michael M. is right with his comment 😉

Mark says:

10/22/2004 at 2:31 pm

That makes sense Michael. However, I think it would be the preference of the blog owner. On this blog, your observation makes sense. I do not know how it would be different for anyone else, but someone MIGHT be encoding for some reason. 🙂
I should make it a choice. I wish I could come up with an acceptable way of configuring plugins from the admin interface.

Poonam says:

10/30/2004 at 3:13 pm

There is a definite problem with this plugin. I downloaded it yesterday and activated it. There was no problems until I was receiving emails that people were not able to post comments on my website. It seemed that it changed the link of the “Say It” where you submit the comment (like your “Post” button below) so that it goes to http://www.fbi.gov website.

The minute I deactivated the plugin, people were able to post comments again. Please let me know how this is able to be fixed and if anybody else had this problem.

11/1/2004 at 9:02 am

Please make sure that there are no lingering spaces or blank new lines within your common spam words inside the wp admin interface.

11/1/2004 at 5:58 pm

is this found in the threestrikes.php plugin itself? What file should I check?

Spam is getting worse and worse..argh..

11/1/2004 at 6:04 pm

Look under your wp-admin interface, under options->discussion->common spam words

11/1/2004 at 6:26 pm

Found it. Thanks. 🙂

11/1/2004 at 6:30 pm

I would like your spam words Mark.

http://www.neerajpoonam.com/wp is my blog. 🙂

Ken Dixon says:

11/15/2004 at 9:31 am

I have set up yuour plugin, but when I try to login I get the following message.
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/sites/kendixon.net/public_html/findias/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php:145) in /home/sites/kendixon.net/public_html/findias/wp-login.php on line 257

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/sites/kendixon.net/public_html/findias/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php:145) in /home/sites/kendixon.net/public_html/findias/wp-login.php on line 258

What have I done wrong

Ken

11/15/2004 at 11:17 am

Try and install the plugin again, Sounds like you have a space somewhere. (especially at the end of the file, after ?%gt;

11/15/2004 at 2:36 pm

Thanks works now

11/16/2004 at 5:38 am

I have installed ‘three strikes’ and it works no more spam from the pokerman.
Thanks

Alex says:

11/26/2004 at 1:24 pm

I’ve been having some problems with these spam plugins. After installing three strikes, the wp-login.php page gave me this error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/moero/www/www/blog/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php:2) in /home/moero/www/www/blog/wp-admin/index.php on line 13

If anybody could give me a hand here, that would be great. Thank you!!

11/26/2004 at 10:40 pm

Make sure there is no space between the beginning of the plugin and the first angle bracket.

Dave Seah says:

12/4/2004 at 1:35 am

I’ve noticed an issue with comments that contain single quotes and double quotes…they get escaped with an extra slash if ThreeStrikesSpam is activated. It seems that add_magic_quotes is being called twice on $_POST: once in 3SS, and again in wp-comments-post.php in my WP 1.2 install. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

12/4/2004 at 8:32 am

If that happens, you can take out these lines:
if ($_POST[‘comment’] && !is_array($_POST[‘comment’])) {
//Make sure the information received is parsed, cleaned and stripped correctly (from WP codebase)
if (!get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
$_POST = add_magic_quotes($_POST);
$_COOKIE = add_magic_quotes($_COOKIE);
}

grubgirl says:

12/9/2004 at 3:36 pm

hope this works!! thanks….

Andrea says:

1/3/2005 at 12:10 pm

I’m using WP 1.2. I do not have a section wp-content. Was it supposed to be automatically installed or do I just need to create it myself along with a plugins subdir? Thank you.

1/3/2005 at 2:15 pm

NM. I went ahead and created the wp-content and installed plugin as advised. It’s working perfectly. Thanks for posting this. It’s going to make my life a lot easier.

a-giau says:

1/16/2005 at 9:03 am

Looks like the CVS has code for treating encoded low ASCII as spam indicator:

http://wordpress.org/pipermail.....00865.html

shannon says:

1/19/2005 at 9:29 pm

Can I get your spam words please?

1/19/2005 at 10:22 pm

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/getspamwords.php

Brenda says:

2/4/2005 at 2:39 pm

Umm… I am having a problem. The plugin used to work fine. But when I tested it out just now, I keep getting errors such as the following instead of getting redirected to the FBI site.

Warning: Unknown modifier ‘C’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 110
Warning: Unknown modifier ‘C’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 111
Warning: Unknown modifier ‘C’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 112
Warning: Unknown modifier ‘C’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 113Warning: Unknown modifier ‘H’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 110
Warning: Unknown modifier ‘H’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 111
Warning: Unknown modifier ‘H’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 112
Warning: Unknown modifier ‘H’ in /home/little/public_html/wp-content/plugins/threestrikes.php on line 113

I have deactivated the plugin, downloaded a new copy, uploaded it, and reactivated it again. But still no avail. 🙁

amy says:

2/6/2005 at 9:30 am

Hi,
I’m brand new to plugins, so sorry for the uninformed question, but when you say “enable it within your admin interface”, do you mean setting the permissions? If so, what should they be? If not, what does it mean?
Thanks for making your work available like this,
Amy

2/6/2005 at 9:42 am

Thats no problem Amy. It means to go to the admin of your blog, click on plugins and Activate the plugin in question. (click on the activate button on the right)

2/8/2005 at 6:36 am

Thanks!
I can’t believe it. No more online poker. Thank you thank you.

Nulla Salus says:

2/12/2005 at 6:57 pm

Removing these lines only made my blog disappear, as in a white screen appeared instead.

OkieBoy says:

2/18/2005 at 4:00 pm

I’ve upgraded my threestrikes plugin to threestrikes12.php and it works great to catch the bad stuff, for what it’s worth, so did the previous one.

But just like with the original threestrikes I still have the problem of backslashes showing up in comments before apostrophes and quote marks. I saw the post above and looked for that code supplied to delete it but do not find it in the plugin’s code.

Any other place to look or something else to try? Thanks!

2/18/2005 at 4:21 pm

OK, found a quick-easy fix for the backslash problem at http://bish.lechoso.com/category/web-dev/

It’s a one line addition to the vars.php file in the wp-includes directory that adds a filter to remove them.

Add this line:

add_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘stripslashes’);

below the rest of the filters. Works fine!

Travis says:

2/20/2005 at 4:08 pm

Warning: Division by zero in /usr/home/zero/domains/obscurethoughts.net/public_html/wp-content/plugins/bayes/class.naivebayesian.php on line 80

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /usr/home/zero/domains/obscurethoughts.net/public_html/wp-content/plugins/bayes/class.naivebayesian.php:80) in /usr/home/zero/domains/obscurethoughts.net/public_html/wp-comments-post.php on line 44

??? 🙁

2/20/2005 at 4:19 pm

Please try the new version from here:
http://weblogtoolscollection.c.....n-updated/

gfd says:

11/20/2005 at 5:13 am

ffsdsdf

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