Comments on: Other WordPress anti-spam measures: rename wp-login.php, wp-comments-post.php, and wp-trackback.php

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:10:04 +0000

Thanks Pete,

Sorry for the delay in acknowledging this, and thanks for your helpful site. It is quite obvious you devote a lot of energy and dedication to this project, and I appreciate it.

Regards,

Alan
http://www.alanstancliff.com/wordpress/

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:12:52 +0000

Thanks for the reply, Peter.

At the risk of being tiresome, when you refer to renaming the "core files" again, I am assuming you mean renaming wp-login.php, wp-comments-post.php, and wp-trackback.php.

So if I understand, the update would just load new versions of the above, and I would need to rename them.

That’s it?

Regards,

Alan

Reply from Peter: Yes, that’s what I mean. Especially if you’re renaming wp-login.php, though, there are probably a few references you’ll need to change. As noted in the original post (which is getting quite old) you should also search through the WordPress files to see which files reference the ones you’re renaming.

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:02:03 +0000

Hi Peter,

Suppose I do this. How does that then affect the automatic update from the control panel?

I ask because last night, I just upgraded from Version 2 to version 2.8 (a delay of 3 or more years), which had to be done manually.

My heart was in my mouth the whole time.

Regards,

Alan

Reply from Peter: You would have to rename the core files again. As for template changes, if you’re using a custom template you wouldn’t have to make any changes except as needed for any new features.

By: Torgeir

Torgeir — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:09:01 +0000

I was, well not actually spammed, but there where lots of visits on my site or wp-comments-post.php and I thought I should trick these spammers… So I made a copy of wp-comm… and wp-trackback…. and renamed the original files, then I altered the files these spammers would hit on, and wrote a simple refreshcode into them, sending the spammers to a site of my choice I just got lots of hits on a video I have on YouTube

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:31:15 +0000

Hi Jimmy,

Yes, if you use the correct trackback link and that site has trackbacks enabled (my site doesn’t) it will work.

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:50:14 +0000

is it possible to trackback a site that doesn’t have the link on the page? If you guess it right will it go live?

By: Magda

Magda — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:58:29 +0000

thank you for that tip! and also for the anti-spam plugin. I’m using both for my site.

By: John Apache

John Apache — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:04:12 +0000

Nice one, I changed my urls to wpcco.php and I am seeing intelligent spambots that issue a GET request for my blog page, then find the changed url by looking at the source! then they issue a POST full of spam to my renamed file! ahh.

http://www.askapache.com/2007/htaccess/fight-blog-spam-with-apache.html

By: Christian Donner

Christian Donner — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:24:22 +0000

This is quite outdated, I must say. The bots that spam my blog actually parse the posting page for the correct name of the target. Minutes after I renamed the wp-comments-post.php, I got more spam:

200.88.223.xx – - [09/Mar/2007:22:49:37 +0000] “GET /t-mobile-sda-smartphone-faq.htm HTTP/1.1″ 200 12831 “…./t-mobile-sda-smartphone-faq.htm” “User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
200.88.223.xx – - [09/Mar/2007:22:49:41 +0000] “POST /wp-comments-allowed.php HTTP/1.1″ 302 5 “…../t-mobile-sda-smartphone-faq.htm” “User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

By: Charly Silaban

Charly Silaban — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:26:18 +0000

@Ajay D’Souza
Macromedia Dreamweaver can do it smoothly too.
Just hit Ctrl+F (Find) and choose your location option at “Find In” dropdown menu.

@Peter
Thx alot for this tips