Expanding the possibilities of CleanTalk Anti-Spam

Checking existing Joomla users for spam

Spambot messages (comments) are often disguised as ordinary user messages, but contain sponsored links or text. The main tasks of such messages are the user’s transition to a malicious resource, advertising or links to enhance the positions of their site. This compromises the site and can spoil the reputation; search engines can lower the position of the site in search results.

We have implemented a spam check for comments and users who already exist on the site. This allows site administrators to automatically check and identify comments and spambot logs that were not detected by conventional anti-spam tools.

How it works

The plugin checks the creation date of users/comments. The IP/email data is passed to the CleanTalk server by the API method. Next, the IP/email is checked in the CleanTalk database and if on the verification date, these IP/email messages had BlackListed status, and then the API method will return the plugin information about it. The plugin forms a table with suspicious users/comments that can be deleted.

To start scanning, go to the plugin settings: Extensions → Plugin Manager → Anti-Spam from CleanTalk, then click the “Check Spam Users” or “Check Spam Comments” button.

IPv6 support

IPv6 is becoming more and more used on the Internet. It is enough to look at the statistics, from which it follows that in 2017, there was an increase in the use of IPv6 from 14-16% to 18.27- 21.80%.

Leaders of growth were: Germany-35.27, USA-33.01%, Canada — 17.93, EU countries, India, Japan, Brazil increased to 21-27%.

For 2017, we have noted an increase in spam attacks with IPv6 and launched IPv6 support in anti-spam plugins, in the Black List database and API methods.

Managing spam comments in WordPress

CleanTalk Anti-Spam allows you to configure actions for spam comments. The following options are implemented:

Move to the spam folder – all spam comments will be moved to the Spam folder. To avoid a large number of entries in the folder, you can configure automatic cleaning of spam comments older than 15 days.

Ban spam comments without moving to WordPress – in this case, the spam comment will not be added to any of the WordPress folders, information about each entry will only be available in the CleanTalk control panel.

Smart spam comments filter – in this case, spam comments for IP/email that have status in the BlackListed will be placed in the WordPress basket, the remaining spam comments will be moved to the Spam folder. Comments containing Stop Words will be sent to manual moderation.

Blocking emails/nicknames by a mask

This option is more about moderation and allows you to make a ban on the use of certain words in users nicknames based on a mask, for example email *kkk*vvv*@example.com, this will block all addresses with any character set before “kkk”, before “vvv” and after “vvv”.

More information on using personal lists can be found here.