I learned to code long ago — but I worked on mechanical engineering problems. So, the challenges associated with developing the al-gore-rithms are often quite different. (If you looked at my codes, you’d probably also laugh for ohhh soooo many reasons. One of these days I need to force myself to use OOP when it’s helpful, which it often would be with plugins, but rarely is with problems in mechanics and heat transfer!)

But, they work, and I try to avoid security holes. (I can tell I need to read a bit. But then, that’s one of the reasons I read your blog. You explain hacks that exist, then you explain how to secure. Sebastian’s Pamphlets is a good for me too.)

Actually I’m working on this for my blog. To add some domains to the trusted links and allow Google to see them.

PS: 9 years of coding are behind the way I think. If you ever need advice on smth you work on, mail me. I’ll consult U

Then, also, give then a tool with a blacklist.

One idea a lot of work for the user to do regularly (Which means they won’t do it– and makes the tool useless.)

The other idea is ineffective because individual blacklists don’t work for this sort of thing. My knitting blog is spammed with comment SEO stuff like “dog sweater”, not “viagra”.

But your idea is elegant and effective. (Which… doesn’t surprise me. )

I can code that, and possibly also go for overkill. In WP, I can both keep track of what’s a “good link” and record the ID of the post it’s in and keep track of whether it follows. It would take little more coding, almost no extra CPU, and would ensure that if a blogger does include a “bad” link once, no one can sneak in another one later in a different post! (This is useful if — overtime– a company decides to pay for sponsored posts and then later insert the links.)

This way ou would have a bit of work upfront but you would keep control over your links and the work wold be much smaller as you keep adding links.

This is easy for me to do but I have no idea how wordpress works and make a plugin so I’ll just leave it to Lucia expert in WP plugins.

Subliminal, are you saying the plugin should simply build a big list of external links for you to check manually? For some blogs that would be a huge list! I think having a blacklist of terms to check for (in the link text or URL) is the way to go, as long as you can add / delete things from the blacklist.

PS: If this comment came in twice delete one

I’ll write the plugin if anyone actually finds themselve’s infected this way. Otherwise, I’m not sure it’s worth it. (Though, it would be easy enough to do, and people may want to periodically check every link in their database even without the hacking threat.)

Your plugin idea is a good one, especially if this particular form of spam becomes much more prevalent. And to think that only a few years ago, I thought that Spam was something that came out of a can!