Tag: server

Review of VPS.NET – 9 months of usage

I like to use a service for some time in order to make an informed decision about staying or going, it’s something that I don’t take lightly and any one thing cannot make me change no matter how bad it is because as everyone knows companies change and service from those companies change also.

This is why after 9 months I have decided to leave VPS.NET, it’s nothing personal and I’m not saying that it’s not a great service to use for others, it’s just not right for me.

Before I get to the review I’d like to point out that I was using a 1 node VPS at the Salt Lake City cloud running Debian 5.0 x64 and it’s very important that if you’re comparing it to another provider to only compare it with similar services.

Continue reading Review of VPS.NET – 9 months of usage

WordPress/Servage spam IP filtering

I have Akismet set up to keep spam out as well as keeping all comments for moderation, I initially decided to do some IP blocks seeming as there would be a few that would constantly send spam.

The only problem was that as WordPress only use

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']

to determine a user’s IP address which as most people who know PHP know it is a bad idea because it doesn’t take into account proxies etc. In my case it was actually giving Servage’s own IP for every result which wasn’t of much use unless I wanted to block comments/trackbacks altogether.

As there’s no documentation that I could find about where WordPress actually contains the code to find the IP and Google wasn’t much help I had to look manually.

I eventually found it in comments.php in the wp-includes directory.

$commentdata['comment_author_IP'] = preg_replace( '/[^0-9a-fA-F:., ]/', '', $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] );

First to add in the neccessary code a variable must be created, change the above code to this:

$commentdata['comment_author_IP'] = preg_replace( '/[^0-9a-fA-F:., ]/', '',$bp_IP );

Then add the required code above that stating:

$bp_IP = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

This allows the correct IP to be shown in most cases, most of the thanks must go to Jason for this.

Update: This piece of code also works in WordPress 2.6x.