Comments on: New WordPress plugin: AVH First Defense Against Spam

By: BestHelen

BestHelen — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:23:52 +0000

I have found what i was looking for !!! thx )

By: Wrought Iron

Wrought Iron — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:14:17 +0000

Yeah this is a good plugin

By: Windmill

Windmill — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:54:08 +0000

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your speedy response. You have helped me to understand it better now.

Your AVH First Defense Against Spam is working like a song for my Blog. It’s amazing just how many stealth Spammers have been thwarted because of your proactive plugin.

Thank You very much!

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:39:24 +0000

Happy to hear it keeps your blogs almost clean.

P.S. Nice to see a website with ITIL information. I’m a total believer in ITIL.

By: Rene

Rene — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:47:19 +0000

Hi Peter,

I really like the plugin. It seems to stop (almost) all spamming activity on the two sites I’ve installed the plugin at. The explanation you’ve given are answers to the questions I had too!

Great plugin!

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:41:13 +0000

First of all I’m glad you like the plugin.
Concerning the emails you receive:

1. AVH First Defense Against Spam – Error detected
This means the call to Stop Forum Spam failed. The error explains the problem. I actually check the connection again if the first one fails and only then report the error.
The plugin was unable to check if the visiting IP is in the database and therefor does not block it.

2. AVH First Defense Against Spam – Spammer detected
The call to the database was successful and the IP was found in the database.
You can actually receive two sort of emails with this subject line.
In your case the connection is terminated as stated in the email. In other words the spammer is stopped before any content was served.
The other message you can get is without the Threshold message. This means the IP is in the database but it’s not blocked. The threshold for blocking access is not reached. You can set this in the Admin section of the plugin. The reason why I have set the default threshold to 3 is explained in the FAQ section in the Admin section.

By: Windmill

Windmill — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:46:09 +0000

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your wonderful anti Spam plugin. I had it installed last night. I have a few questions to ask of you. What does these email messages that I received mean? I received two different kinds of messages through the night.

1. [Windmill on the Hill] AVH First Defense Against Spam – Error detected

An error has been detected
Error: avhfdas error:http_request_failed – couldn’t connect to host

IP: 66.249.70.59
Accessing: /?p=2255&cpage=1
Call took: 1.00098896027

2. [Windmill on the Hill] AVH First Defense Against Spam – Spammer detected [195.229.242.57]

Stop Forum Spam has the following statistics:
Spam IP: 195.229.242.57
Last Seen: 2008-01-06 16:45:06
Frequency: 16

Treshhold (3) reached. Connection terminated
Accessing: /?p=2302
Call took: 0.220874071121

My questions:

a) Is Number 1 notification informing me that there is something that I configured wrongly in my .htaccess file while following your Tips and Tricks?

b) Do both these notifications mean the same thing – that a Spammer was prevented?

c) If these two notifications do not mean the same thing, what is the difference between the two?

Thank you for your time.