Stop spam comment likes via The Reader
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Today I’ve had 17 spam likes of comments on my blog (Bye, Weekly Photo Challenge) even though I have disabled likes on comments as suggested by support in the forums to control this kind of spamming. If a site has likes on comments disabled, please can likes on comments also be disabled in The Reader?
If this is not practical, please consider treating comment likes like this:
Only blog admins can like comments left on a blog (level one comments).
Only the commenter can like any replies (all other levels).
If someone wanted to interact with a comment not addressed directly to them, they could still leave their own comment as a reply, which would be able to be approved by blog admins as usual.Ideally we would have access to approve / delete comment likes as has already been suggested. My main worry is that my commenters will wonder who the person is, not realise they are liking everyone’s comments and click through to their blog, rewarding the spammer or worse.
I am sorry you are having to try to deal with spam activity on our behalf and hope you’ll manage to keep one step ahead.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
I am sorry to hear that you have troubles with these spam likes. You are right, in the Reader, comment likes are possible despite the “disabled comment likes” setting. I’ve flagged this to our developers here: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/26523 (feel free to keep an eye on this)
For now, unfortunately, I cannot do anything else for you in this regard. I can sympathize with your worries about giving spammers too much attention but after all it’s not too likely that all of your commenters will click back to them.
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Hi,
I’ve just had another 20 spam likes and some spam comments: the latter are easy enough to flag as spam.
I’m not concerned that all my commenters will click back to see who has liked their comment, but if any do respond and are infected by malware it would be a sad day for me. It is embarrassing as I recently wrote a post on how to stop spam comment likes after a small flurry of them, based on advice from your support team in the forums. Turns out that was a bit premature!
But thanks for your help. I really appreciate it and know it must be very hard to stay one step ahead of these kinds of attacks. You mentioned the API in the GitHub – is there anything I can do to control this from my settings? I am not really sure what that bit means.
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Staying on top of spam is definitely a challenge and we appreciate your patience as we work to improve our system to prevent spam likes (or Spikes as we like to call them :) ) as we do with comments.
While this isn’t a perfect solution, I believe comment likes work like post likes in the sense that they take you to the visitors Gravatar Profile. This helps protect your commenters from being taken directly to an infected site.
You mentioned the API in the GitHub – is there anything I can do to control this from my settings? I am not really sure what that bit means.
An API is a way for the interface/settings in one area of your site (like the Disable Post Likes) to “talk” to another area (such as the reader). There’s not a setting that you can control yet, the GitHub issue is to get things reported to the proper folks so they can further investigate and patch the setting.
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