I’ve got a WP client who I have admin access to and had left my own email address in the admin section. So, needless to say, I get the moderation queue notifications. Recently, that blog has been getting postively harrassed by permutations on one theme. They all go to something-top-pharmacy (dot net), and I’ve seen hundreds of permutations of it. It was this particular client who inspired me to go and change the moderation.php to make it check ‘delete’ by default, instead of ‘do nothing’. I got tired of clicking.
So, I did a search for this bottom-feeding-scum-pharmacy along with the term “comment spam” to see if anyone had gotten tired enough of them to come up with some sort of block (from the site, not just via a blacklist or moderation queue). Didn’t find any, but boy did I find blogs, mostly MT blogs, with lots and lots and lots of comment spam they’d never gotten rid of.
So, I’m offering a new service. Call it “blog cleaning lady, if you will". If you have a blog with spam problems, or know someone who does, please read on. And if you like the idea, please link, so I don’t get tempted to start spamming blogs with ‘remove your spam’ offers. 
If you are on MT, and don’t have mt-blacklist installed, I’ll install it for you for free! I’ll need FTP access to the cgi-bin, or wherever you have mt installed in order to FTP it up. So if you have CPanel and want to set me up, set me up with /cgi-bin (or whatever - if you don’t know it, just use /). In that case, I don’t charge you a penny. You can just go in and activate it your self, the URL will be
http://yoursite.xxx/path to mt/mt-blacklist.cgi
Warnings:
- The default blacklist has gotten so large that you may not be able to import the whole thing in one import; if that happens, cut and paste half, or a third, at a time.
- Unless you have a very small site, with very few comments, do NOT try to search all your comments at once using the blacklist. It will crash, and possibly do a core dump which will eat up your disk space with amazing speed (the core dump will show up in the same directory mt is in and may be safely deleted).
You can also hire me to activate mt-blacklist, put in the blacklist (along with some regexp that the default list does not have, and which make it smaller) and do spam searches until your site is clean — or reasonably clean, blacklist doesn’t catch everything, and though I will do a very serious hunt to see if there is spam it missed, some may still be missed. But it won’t be many. I’ll need fairly high mt-access to do so, since mt-blacklist practices a bit too much security (you need ‘create new blog access’ to activate it, for instance). But I’ll promise not to leave pro-war posts on anti-war blogs. Or pro-hedonism posts on theocon blogs…
I’ll charge about 1/2 cent (US) per spam to get rid of the stuff, with a minimim of $5 and a maximum of $50 (rounded up or down to the nearest dollar). The max is because once you get up into tens of thousands of spams, you have so many ‘like’ spams that can be found with one specific regexp search that you can delete many hundreds at a time… It doesn’t really take me much longer to delete 30,000 spams than 6,000. The ones that really take the time are the ones that sneak in once or twice and leave “nice site!” and just one link to their site. The min is because even if you have only 10 spams, I’ve still got to look through everything to find them. And if you have only 10, you probably don’t need me anyway. 
