SCRUBBING THE SITE!
AMBER LOVE 18-JULY-2015 I had been ignoring the user database for months because I had tried a couple of WordPress plugins to best manage them and keep the spammers out. All that seems to work is Akismet and it doesn’t do anything for user registration; it only addresses spam comments and login attempts. But it still allows user accounts to be created. So the 8,424 malicious login attempts have been stopped, but there were over 9,700 registered users. I also have wanted to figure out how to stop fake hits and read up about it.
USER ACCOUNTS
Because WordPress isn’t the best thing out there for user management, their “bulk” display only shows 20 user names at a time. I started at 8 A.M. and only finished at 2:20 P.M. going through records 20 at a time to delete spam or old accounts.
Now, unfortunately, I’m afraid that in my daze of clicking there’s a couple people who were legitimate users and commenters who have been deleted. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t find a better way to obliterate the spam content. WordPress doesn’t even have a decent sorting and filter display. As you know when you register for a site, you have your display name and then first name, last name fields and email address. In WordPress 4.2.2 they still haven’t addressed how terrible their sorting is. I clicked on the name field to try and get all Null records at the top of the list. It doesn’t work. It still sorted by username instead. I used to write databases. It should never be this hard to sort and filter. Hell, Excel can do exactly what I want but I have no idea how to do this stuff in WordPress.
That’s the worst of the news. Unfortunately, if you are a friend of the site who comments, there’s a small chance your login and comments are gone. Please create a new login and make sure that you fill out the First and Last name fields because that’s the key way to see quickly who is real or not. There were only a handful of fake accounts that had text in those fields.
FAKE TRAFFIC BLOCKED
There’s also some php code I’d like to paste into a file, but with WordPress you don’t actually see your files.There a many hits to the site which unfortunately are not authentic traffic. They all stem from some asshole crawler called “semalt” and it appears in a variety of malicious ways. I’ve never been the type that’s only after the number. I don’t allow fake Twitter followers so I don’t want fake traffic hits in my analytics. I use the analytics to supply to organizations like ReedPop to prove that I’ve got a bonafide following in order to get press credentials.
The image above is just one sample of what the “semalt” crawler does. There are tons of them. I get a variety each day. The good thing is that they are so well known for being dubious that there’s a lot of articles about them and their shitty business practices. I pasted some html code into the footer file so I’m really hoping that takes care of it. I think I may need to have code for every single garbage url they own though, so, chances are I have not fixed this problem.
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.