Phosphorus and Lime

Noticed I was getting an unusual number of hits all of the sudden on my mushpup wikka wiki. At first, I thought: "At last, people are finally catching on."

Then I looked where they were coming from. Primarily, Google. But they weren't searching for "mushpup" or "passwords". Instead, it was more like, "nubile rapidshare" and "Aneta TeenPinkVideo". Hmmmm... I don't remember posting anything about pink videos.

Well, I did a Google search on these terms, found the mushpup listing and figured it out: wikka comment spam.

Googled for a shotgun solution. Didn't really find one but came up with one pretty quickly.

Three steps:

1. Backup your database
Now as good as time as any. Especially if you screw up one of the next two steps.

2. Change wikka.config.php settings
The key ones default_write_acl and default_comment_acl. Set to the following:



This will limit page editing and commenting privileges to registered users.

These are the global settings. Access can also be limited on a per-page basis by the through the admin web interface.

info on other settings here: http://wikkawiki.org/ConfigurationOptions

3. Delete any existing spam comments
This is pretty easy since they're all in a simple table named something like wikka_comments.

phpMyAdmin makes it simple to delete the offenders. Or you could use a statement like this:



(81.177.22.243 was the actual ip adding most the spam.)

keywords: wiki, wikka, spam, comments, comment spam, mysql, phpmyadmin