A primer on fighting backlink spam for ExpressionEngine

Spam sucks. If you are a spammer there is a special HOT place waiting for you after death. No one likes you and your mama thinks you are ugly.

OK now that I have that off my chest there has been an awful lot of registration spam hitting ExpressionEngine websites lately. While I cannot consider myself an expert (although I do think Greg from Purple Dogfish is) I do think I have some to share. I have come across a few things that I do to help fight registration spam.

So Bjorn Borresen just tweeted about a site that has a list of ExpressionEngine sites that has paired the list with some information on how to spam these sites with backlinks. A similar ping of Google shows that this monster is rearing it’s ugly head and is not going to die anytime soon. So what is the community to do?

First take a simple step to fight registration spam by changing the trigger word.

If you go to Admin->Members and Groups->Membership Preferences you will see at the bottom a Trigger word. Most people dont bother to change this. If you have a site that will never use Membership templates or functionality then just type in “aw;okfhoiahv” and be done with it. Oh. And you can also just set the “Allow New Member Registrations?” at the top to no But the changing of the trigger word makes me feel better.

Invest some Shekels.

The aforementioned Greg has an awesome add-on for culling spam registrations from an ExpressionEngine site. If you go to the Purple Dogfish website and purchase his module called member utilities it will help. Everyday I run Member Utilities to see all of the Bios on this site and change the members group to Banned. This bans their IP address, email and empties their profile and deletes any posts that they may have made. Of course this requires action (you doing something) but at least your Ranking wont take a hit for being a link farm.

Invest some more Shekels

Low has another great add-on that is worth a mention. It is called Low No Spam. Through the use of some of the larger lists of spammer (Askimet or Typepad Antispam) Low’s add-on can block these pesky spammers from being able to register or comment on your site.

Invest a few minutes and use a valid ExpressionEngine license

Lisa Jill wrote an article on the ExpressionEngine blog about stopping Registration Spam. It covers some of the items above. But one of mention is the Blacklist Module. If you go into the modules portion of the control panel the very first module is the Blacklist Whitelist module. You have to have a valid EE license to use this one (I would hope you would be using a valid license anyway). But if you click to open the module you are able to download a file of known spammers from EE and write their information to the .htaccess file so that they cannot even access the site.

Others? Share em with us in the comments

I know there are other methods. Leave a quick comment. Let us know what has worked for you.

Marcus Neto is a member of the ExpressionEngine Pro Network. His design studio is called Blue Fish Design Studio. He is also the founder of EETemplates.com. You can find further ramblings on his personal blog or on twitter

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