[wp-hackers] Post Spam

[Ash Goodman]

@Otto

A look at source of the url you gave (
http://www.thesleepingbagshop.com/sleeping-bags/slumberjack-tourlite-40f-regular-sleeping-bag/)
shows that the related blogs section has a class of pc_pingback. A
search
on google for pc_pingback turns up
http://joshteam.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/pingcrawl-wordpress-plugin/

It works thus (according to the website)

**

   - The plugin will listen to anytime a post is saved, published, updated,
   etc.
   - The plugin on execution time will find all the tags on the post and
   perform the following per tag:
      - Use Google API to check for ( 35 ) results with the tag name.
      - With the ( 35 ) results it loops through them and performs the
      following
         - Does the result have a pingback meta tag?
         - Does the result have trackback somewhere in the source
         - (if yes to both) it stores the pingback xmlrpc location in
         memory.
         - (if no to either) we skip that record and move to the next.
         - Once their are 5 legit pingable servers we then append their
         links to the post we currently added.
         - We then retrieve the xmlrpc urls from memory, and execute
         a pingback.ping against the xmlrpc as defined in the pingback 1.0
         spec <http://hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback-1.0>.



A bit of irony. The offending website (the sleeping bags website) is using
a  spam plugin to stop comment spam.

Perhaps a look at the plugins source (
http://joshteam.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/pingcrawl2/ ) will reveal a method
to block it? (I would look but I won't get the time for at least a month or
2)

Ash