Comment Spammed! How do I shut off comments?

Site Admin > Plugins and you can disable or uninstall the Comments plugin.
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I've been a gallery user since 2005 and upgraded to gallery version 2 through my IT consultant.
I have uploaded over 26,000 photos, all students from Pre-k to 12th for Aquinas Academy.

I've just founud and joined this site.

In 2008, someone hacked into the gallery and posted very vulgar comments and ads for viagra and that sort.
I've disconnected the web site from The school web page.

Until now I've been helpless.

How do you clean out 70,000 comments?

How do you prevent anyone else hacking their way in again?

I've emailed support but have not heard form them.

If anyone can help or comment I'd appreciate it.

Canon Pro

suprsidr - THANK YOU!

I see you have 4500 posts! Wondering if you know of a better method
to find someone in "paid Support" to respond. I've emailed 2x for help
and happily pay for this, but, so far, rubbing two sticks together.

Is there someone here that knwos this software that you can refer me to?

CP

Thanks!

I managed to install CommentBlaster and it zapped over 2,500 spam comments, 500 per whack. All were for some dating website, with hundreds of different cities in the message, I assume so they would show up in search engines.

I did not see nivekiam's post above about disabling the comment plugin until just now - so I just now disabled the comments. Yesterday I was hit with two new spam comments from a new spammer, so I needed to simply shut it off. Thanks!

Although these both worked, I must say that this is not a very "user friendly" fix - and I am shocked that there is not an easy way to simply select "allow comments" or not built into the Album setup page (as there is in Wordpress).

It would be nice if there were also a way to bulk erase, perhaps similar to the "edit captions" feature, only for comments.

Thanks for the replies - it solved my problem!

I would recommend this solution for Canon Pro as well, since it worked for me.

Thanks again!

Try the extended captcha module on the creations page on my site.

What it does is to query the databases at BotScout.com and fspamlist.com and if the visitor's ip address, email address or username has been used for spamming in the past, then they will never be able to get validation on any page that calls the captcha module. (Contact Owner, Comment, Login, Registration etc). So it doesn't matter whether their algorithms can defeat the captcha or not of whether it is a human or not ... although clean IPs will go through but only through to face the captcha.

Note that it doesn't discriminate so if you happen to pop into an internet cafe while traveling through some spam server and/or compromised PC infested location to upload your snaps, you might find that you are unable to log in and will just have to wait till you get back home.

Also, you might be locked out yourself if your ISP happens to allocate you an IP address recently vacated by a spam server or compromised machine. Reboot your modem to get another IP. (I'll add a feature to the admin to bypass this later)

I put it together for my own use and you will need to manually edit one line for now. I'll package it up better later so that the BotScout API Key is added to the config page.

Also working on a ProjectHoneyPot based module to completely block the scumbags from visiting a site at all and to catch more of them for the spammer databases.

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dakanji.com

I'll be updating the module over time for general release. At this point, if you are locked out and cannot reboot your modem, you can sftp to your server and comment out $bot = $this->_botscout($form['custName'], $form['custEmail']); around Line 50 of /modules/captcha/classes/CaptchaValidationPlugin.inc.

I only ever log in at home and when I pickup a bad IP, I am able to drop it for another. With ProjectHoneyPot, there will be more flexibility on such false positives.

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dakanji.com