What is TweetBacks WordPress Plug-In?

The TweetBack plug-in automatically picks up conversations when people Twitter about your particular WordPress blog post and inserts each tweet as a comment in your blog.

It was working out pretty nicely for a while.  I even recommended TweetBacks to members of my inner circle, but then I noticed some very strange things only happening on this blog.

Suddenly, when I looked at the “Review Comments” console, I saw gobs and gobs of comments (~2,000) in many in different languages tweeting links to this this URL:

http://bit.ly/1BOWLu

None of the links to that URL had anywhere near the same copy in the Tweet, obviously they were just trying to scam any and everyone in the world to visit the URL.  Perhaps it loads malware or something, and the spammer isn’t terribly picky about how to prey on their next victim.

I immediately went to Google to see if anyone else has suffered from a similar malady .  Maybe there was some sort of confusion with my specific URL or something, right?  Well, I found enough blog posts about the issue for me to conclude that this was a widespread problem.  It became obvious to me that the right course of action was…

My Recommendation

1. Immediately Deactivate then uninstall the TweetBacks WordPress Plug-in
2. To get rid of the offending Tweets/Comments, execute the following SQL if you have access to a SQL tool (or ask your hired-gun nerdfolk to do this for you):
   

   DELETE
   FROM wp_comments
   WHERE wp_comments.comment_content LIKE
   “%http://bit.ly/1BOWLu%”

3. Help anyone else you see suffering from this by pointing them here.

Post Script:  (The Developer Responds)

Since sharing with the world, via Twitter, my recommendation to uninstall the TweetBacks Wordpress plug-in , several interesting things have happened.

1. The author of the script, @jdevalk replied to me through Twitter, telling me that I have no idea what I’m talking about, and that the “right way” to handle this undesired behaviour is to talk to the developer first.

While I respect his right to his opinion, I beg to differ with his prescribed method of resolution.  I believe that the proper way to handle any threat such as this is to

• immediately deal with the situation at hand,
• prevent further attack, then
• determine if there was any malice involved before making any personal accusations (which I have not).

Post-Post Script:  (United Against Spam!)

I have been working with Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) to iron out the exact cause of the issue.  He does seem like a rather nice guy , and is earnestly digging into the bug which has caused this unfortunate situation.  I look forward to being able to use this plug-in again.

After I have used it for a while and have greater comfort that we’ve bulletproofed the application and that you will not be adversely affected by any further bugs, I will happily share with you the results of our joint effort to combat the spammers .

No related posts.

So, here’s something you might find handy if you’re setting up a WordPress blog for yourself.  Maybe you already have one and just didn’t know how to optimize this (You know who you are!) because you’re as Stupid as George Bush .

To do this you’ll have to update your header.php file – the simple way to do this is to navigate to the current theme folder on your web server (in the wp-content/themes/ area) and copy the header.php file on to your PC. There, make a backup of the file (in case you need to restore it later on), open it in a text editor or an html editor and locate the following tags:

<title>
</title>

Once you find that chunk, delete it and replace it with this snippet of html, instead:

<title>
<?php if(is_home()) { bloginfo(’title’); } else{ wp_title(”); echo ‘ » ‘; bloginfo(’name’); } ?>
</title>

Then, rather than your blog name or, heaven forbid, the word "Archive" appear first in the title — the title of your post actually appears first in the title.   Then the search engines will believe that your page has more to do with that particular title, and get you more search engine traffic for the keywords which appear in your title.

Enjoy!

No related posts.