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Fighting Spam Comments in DotNetBlogEngine.Net

March 28, 2009 08:28 by ckincincy

DotNetBlogEngine.NET (DNBE) has many extensions and managers to fight comment spam, but no matter what happens the spammers seem to be one step ahead of the automated system available to us. 

So I went back to a static extension from Chris Blankenship. After looking at it, I determined I wanted to add a few more fields to statically block comments.  Thus Comment Blacklister 2.0 is born. 

I have taken his extension and added the ability to block commenter’s by email, IP, and web url. 

Nothing special about it.  Download the zip file and put the CS file into your App_Code folder, then manage it through the Extension Manager.

Just for reference here is the other main comment spam extension I use, though as a stand alone it is not enough.

Download Commentor Blacklist 2.0.


Abusive Spiders - GateKeeper

January 11, 2009 15:39 by ckincincy

image

Chris Blankenship has been on a crusade lately about abusive spiders.  I was interested in some of the fixes he was applying to it, but a few weeks ago I got an email from him about a solution he was developing, ‘GateKeeper’.  I reviewed the code and it all looked good, but he wasn’t ready yet to fully release it into the wild.

It finally got to that point and I installed it on my two DotNetBlogEngine.net blogs. So far I have been really impressed with it.  I’m really interested to see how it affects my overall traffic.  Right now I have four blocked user agents:

baiduspider, larbin, sogou, sosospider.  All of those came from Chris’s recommendation.  Then I immediately got a Slurp violation, though I am going to give them one more failure before I block them.  Chris also has MSN blocked.  A lot of my traffic comes from Live Search, so I’m a little scared to do that.

I did fall on one issue with the solution though.  When I installed it, I had it set to automatically block violators.  Unknown to Chris and I is that Google caches the robots.txt file!  So since they didn’t get my new robots.txt file, they were blocked!  So it is recommended to not turn on the automatic blocking for at least a few days.

Related post from Chris’s site:
The Continued Struggle With Spiders
To catch a spider…
Abusive Web Crawlers
Blocking Bad UserAgents and IP Addresses
The elusive Robots.txt file


New Blog Engine Extension - Comment Count

November 13, 2008 18:20 by ckincincy

The Comment Count Extension adds an image to the end of each RSS post showing how many comments have been made on the post. 

I chose to link to an image so whenever people look at your post in their RSS reader they will see the current number of post.  It also gives you an easy way to embed a message to your readers.

CommentCountInUse

To install this extension you can download the file below and put the comments in your BlogEngine web site.  No .config files need changed.

This extension has been configured to work with the extension manager:

CommentCountExtensionManager

Since it is an image you have to set the Width and Height of the image.  Then you can define the size of the font used.

Finally you have the string to display in your RSS feed.  The (x) is where the number of post will be placed.

Download
commentcount1.0.zip (2.94 kb) - November 13, 2008


Top Referrals User Control

September 12, 2008 03:00 by ckincincy

So Chris Blankenship, maker of many DotNetBlogEngine extensions has done it again.

He created one that shows the top referrals to your site.  He did it in such a great way, allowing for many aspects of it to be specific to your setup.  From the width of the columns to the number of items to show.

You can see my top referrals down the left column.