Worst Offenders

NOTE: Worst Offenders for WordPress 2.5 is currently a pre-alpha release for developer feedback only.

If you use any anti-spam tool you will no doubt be delighted that spam can be automatically identified, but less happy that you now have to either trawl through the spam to check for false positives, or just give up and hope for the best – this is where Worst Offenders can help: it analyses messages already marked as spam and uses several techniques to identify messages with common sources, subjects and content – those which are definitely spam. These Worst Offenders can be deleted en-masse, hopefully leaving just a handful of messages that can be checked by hand.

To do

Switch to using wp_cache wherever options were used
Improve count function to remove duplicates

How are the worst offenders identified

A series of litmus tests has been defined, each test looks for different clues that may (when seen together) make it obvious that a message really is spam. for example, the IP test looks for multiple messages that come from the same IP address.

What litmus tests are there?

1. IP Address – multiple messages from one source.
2. MD5 – multiple messages where the body text has the same MD5 hash
3. Link Count – messages that contain more than n Links.
4. Domain – Messages advertising the same URL
5. Email – multiple messages from one email address.
6. Name length – messages where the author name has more than 5 words

Can more litmus tests be devised?

Yes, the test system is plugabble.

1. Upload the wo3 Folder to to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Check out the WorstOffenders tab under the main Comments tab.