damaged people dot com

I have comments turned OFF on one of my blogs.

My inbox is being filled with comment approval requests. Even for postings I've not made yet. It appears whatever 'bot' they are running, has simply run past the end of my postings, but it's still running. And I've had comments turned off since the beginning.

WTF?

I know the darn things are taking up space in my database, but if they are never approved, is there any way to for someone other then me, to fish them out, like for Google ranking?

I just hit the delete link and delete them as soon as they come in.

Any pointers from the more knowledgeable folks?

Thanks.

I can give you a fix that will make them go away

It's working for the domains I run (no spam comments for about 2 months now).

There's a file here.

It will replace your wp-comments.php file (you may want to make a backup first) and you'll also want to rename your wp-comments-post.php (that's the page they connect directly to when they post spam on your blog).

You can rename custom-comments-post.php to anything you'd like, but you'll need to change the wp-comments.php to reflect it.

Let me know when you have this so I can remove it (I don't want the spammers getting it).

Got it, thanks, I'll play with it.

For now, I just renamed all comments.php files to "old_wp-comments-xxxxx.php", fixed up the index so it doesn't call the comments file, and it works great.

This only works though, because I have commenting turned off right now. I've been waiting to get some more content and stuffs before turning comments on.

Your fix should help me out a bit once I get there.

Thank you.

My fix is simple and stupid, but it totally works.

More good times on the spam front!

They tried a new tactic with me last night and this morning: using trackbacks. I deleted about 600 of these in the past 12 hours and am starting to get a little grumpy about it.

I 'think' I've disabled them, but I'm not sure (of course... this kills ALL trackbacks, and I'm not happy about that).

I'll look into it more and see if I can come up with something more viable.

off-topic question here. . .

What the hell -are- trackbacks? Why would I want to use them, what are they good for, etc. I have zero understanding of them. (thus I've had them turned off since inception).

A trackback is pretty cool. When someone puts a link to your post directly (ie: http://www.domain.com/index.php?p=100) and someone clicks it.... wordpress looks at the refering URL. If it has the same syntax (ie: it came from WP or MT), it will automatically post an excerpt of the post on the other site that links to you as a "trackback" in the comments section of that post.

Confusing?

Here's a couple pages that might explain it better:
http://www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/what-is-tb.php
http://www.cruftbox.com/cruft/docs/trackback.html