How To Stop Review Spam

[nootkan]

Hi Mark, just renewed my subscription again.

Not sure why it didn't auto renew but hopefully it will now.

I reversed your and cajkan's advice back to allow reviews:
How to stop review spam

Is there another way (plugin maybe?), to stop spammers from writing reviews by blocking certain words or phrases?

Only getting them once in awhile so I assume they are manually entered and not a bot.

I would like to keep the good reviews if I could for seo purposes.

Blocking ips doesn't work anymore as most spammers now a days spoof ip addresses or use bots that do the same.

Nootkan

 

[cajkan]

Hi Mark, just renewed my subscription again.

Not sure why it didn't auto renew but hopefully it will now.

I reversed your and cajkan's advice back to allow reviews:
How to stop review spam

Is there another way (plugin maybe?), to stop spammers from writing reviews by blocking certain words or phrases?

Only getting them once in awhile so I assume they are manually entered and not a bot.

I would like to keep the good reviews if I could for seo purposes.

Blocking ips doesn't work anymore as most spammers now a days spoof ip addresses or use bots that do the same.

Nootkan

Inside admin panel there is profanity filter, did you test that ?

I'm not sure if its gonna work but its worth to try.

 

[nootkan]

Hi cajkan, thanks for the reply.

Yes I looked at that but it only replaces words with non-profane words.

I was looking for a plugin or some help with some code to block the spam altogether from the reviews if that is possible.

 

[cajkan]

One good solution might be admin approval. So before review is published must be reviewed by admin.

This happened to my site where I allowed users to change URLs, and some of the spammers started to submit normal URLs and after few days they changed to some weird sites

So URL change on my site must be approved by admin, i guess you can implement something similar or maybe @Mark or @Basti can help you or maybe they have some other ideas.

 

[nootkan]

Hi cajkan, thanks again for your reply.

I already have been using admin approval but I don't normally have the time to monitor the script so I was hoping for something else.

No worries I'll disable the reviews as before while I search for a developer on Upwork who can do this for me.

Thanks again.

 

[Mark]

The reviews system is no longer supported but it should be easy enough to add some spam protection to the old one. I'll see if I can put together a plugin today for you.

 

[Mark]

edit sources/rate.php

find this line (line 92):

      $review = $this->bad_words($review);

add this after it:

    eval (PluginManager::getPluginManager ()->pluginHooks ('rate_process_before_insert'));

then you can upload the attached plugin, if you get more spam (and I suspect you will) please include a sample of the spam and I will update the plugin rules in this plugin.

 

[nootkan]

Hi Mark, thanks for taking the time to do this. Sorry it took so long to respond. Been very busy lately.