During working on the new features for transposh, we have stumbled upon an issue which we could fix. The issue was that many bots scanning this site scanned pages with the parameter “replytocom” which is quite useless. Apparently – this useless parameter has caused over 2GB of traffic for this site in the last 9 months.
We have taken the liberty to extract a few lines of code and create a plugin which fixes this. Now available at the wordpress plugin directory.
A small rant about the wordpress site, since the voting for plugins is anonymous, the plugin was voted down by someone, which we have no way to know who he (or she) is. Not with any reasons we can think of (After all, free plugin, to fix a specific problem, with no intentions, which just works). If we’ll put our hands on him…. 
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#1 by Avinash on December 19, 2009 - 5:32 pm
Can anyone explain in bit detail about parameter “replytocom” and how they are created in our blogs?
#2 by ofer on December 19, 2009 - 5:42 pm
Just look at the reply buttons below the comments, the link is there, used for javascriptless clients
#3 by Avinash on December 19, 2009 - 5:44 pm
Thanks mate for the clarification. I installed it on my blog. Hope it reduces some CPU load atleast some.
#4 by ofer on December 19, 2009 - 6:20 pm
In a test I have done now, this param was ~10% of the site requests (much more than I have ever imagined) so expect some improvement, but this won’t double the cpu speed (or really save little bunnies)