Category: .htaccess
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How to block comment spam
Like all bloggers, I find comment spam to be a constant annoyance. There are many ways to mitigate the problems it causes however and using the following techniques means that this site is subject to almost no comment spam. Use WordPress’ built in comment spam tools – In WordPress Options -> Discussion, fill in the…
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Blocking trackback spam using .htaccess
This morning I received a trackback spam. It pointed at a rubbish domain – ohuudfghj.com, and came from ip address 172.164.210.50 using User Agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90). I took a look at Spamhuntress’ site and sure enough she has a post warning that a trackback spam run is about…
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Using WordPress as a CMS – More problems sorted
WordPress is the Content Manangement System (CMS) used to produce this site but shoehorning it to produce a complete site can cause unforseen problems. For example, my Permalink structure was denying me access to my awstats folder! Why? – this is because I’m publishing the site using WordPress 1.5 and it’s mod_rewrite (created by the…
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Comment spam plugins no longer required!
I have written many posts on my battles with WordPress comment spam but all that appears to be coming to a very satisfactory solution. I am now no longer using any comment spam plugins and I have stopped moderating comments on this blog. How did I get to this enviable position? Well, it has been…
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Block hotlinkers but allow some sites remote access to images using .htaccess
In a previous post I explained how to create a .htaccess file to stop remote image linking (hotlinking) and bandwidth theft – however, there are some situations where you might want your image files linked to from remote sites – how do you make exceptions for these sites? The code to block all sites from…
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Using .htaccess to minimise comment and referrer spam
I have been using my .htaccess file to stop comment and referrer spam on this site and it has been surprisingly successful (so far!). How do I create a .htaccess file capable of greatly reducing comment and referrer spam? Firstly, I use Awstats to analyse visits to my site daily and I use Spam Karma…
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Using .htaccess to redirect hotlinkers to another image
In my last post on using .htaccess to block direct linking of images, I advised simply using the RewriteRule to forbid display of images (i.e. RewriteRule .(gif|png|jpg|jpeg?)$ – [NC,F]). This is a nice simple rule which works a treat to block display of your images on remote sites. However, if you want to take this…
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Using .htaccess to stop remote image linking (hotlinking) and bandwidth theft
Hotlinking, remote image linking, direct image linking is when a remote website embeds images from your site on their webpage(s) – this causes the image to be served from your website to anyone browsing their site – thus they are robbing your bandwidth. How can you stop this? Well, using an .htaccess file in your…