What’s the rate of blogspam now?
I’m starting to wonder if maybe there’s a lull in blogspam right now. We’ve gone after the spammers relentlessly for a while, and at the same time the spammers have gone after PHP-nuke installations really badly.
I obviously can’t use myself as a gauge for this, because of what I do.
So I’m asking you guys. How does it look on your end? Different software, different types of blogs?
May 24th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
I am using MovableType with MT-Blacklists, heavily modified templates and a non-standard names for the comment script.
In the last five months, I had one particular spammer who was quite a nuisance. About a week ago, this spammer suddenly stopped targeting me, and I did not receive any comment spam since.
May 24th, 2005 at 11:05 pm
I got some trackback spam attempts…once. Then I removed the actual word “trackback” from the pages, and it stopped. I used to have severe problems with spam in my old guestbook before I closed it off, but haven’t seen any regular blog spamming yet (knock on wood).
I roll my own blog scripts, which might explain why I haven’t been hit. The comment/trackback functionality is using the same program I used for my guestbook, so it does contain the same filters as my guestbook used to have.
May 25th, 2005 at 7:58 am
It comes in waves. I got three or four zombie-borne comment spam posts that snuck through my filters last week, and a bunch of PRStorm referrers (all referring to my entries on Reffy and rel=nofollow, aren’t they witty?), but now it’s quieted down again.
May 25th, 2005 at 10:50 am
I’ve seen a lot less pinappleproxy traffic than usual over the past week.
I wrote the blog script myself. It’s supported trackback and comments since September last year, but the spam started in January (February for trackbacks).
May 25th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
I’ve just deleted about 2000+ instances of blogspot.com spam. I’m running b2evo. It’s been ok recently, but today it just exploded. Is there a way to combat blogspot.com spam? I honestly haven’t looked into possible solutions.
May 25th, 2005 at 2:30 pm
I just blogged about this at www.geoffarnold.com. I’m not seeing any slowdown. I’m running MT with MT-Blacklist, and it’s catching around 1,000 trackbacks a month. Add to that the ~200/month that I have to clean up by hand…. I haven’t tried playing with .htaccess yet. (I assume you don’t want URLs in the comment.)
May 25th, 2005 at 4:35 pm
There is a solution. It’s called captcha, on blogspot. Don’t know if they’ve implemented that yet. But unless they have, expect the problem to continue.
May 25th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
It doesn’t appear blogspot has the captcha option yet. But I think that is only to prevent spam posted to blogspot. Hbee’s problem is spam pointing to spammy blogspot sites. Nothing you can do there either though. As we have discovered, blogger isn’t doing a good job of shutting down these sites. All we can do is keep submitting abuse complaints and hope. Google hates webspam as much as we do so eventually blogger will deal with the problem.
May 26th, 2005 at 3:34 am
There are automated tools out there that open blogger accounts as part of the spam run. That’s why I said what I said. It will cut down on the number of spammy blogs if they add the captcha.
May 26th, 2005 at 3:38 am
Oops, looks like I didn’t see I had some comments in the moderating queue for a while. Sorry about that guys!
May 26th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
Preventing new spammers signing up at blogspot won’t do any good if they aren’t removing the ones that already have accounts or sign up manually.
May 26th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
I have gotten them to remove spamblogs. That was a while ago. Don’t know how it is now, or how long it’ll take. Probably I logged in that time I got them to remove something. That might be a key. To be a user and do it while logged in.
June 5th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
Captcha only deals with comments, not trackbacks. Of course it’s pointless to flood blogs like mine with trackbacks, because I don’t publish them anywhere that a search engine could find them. However nobody said that blogspammers were rational…..
June 5th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
I am a user of blogspot of course, remember where my blog is. And I was logged in when I submitted the complains. Still no action though even though Halz sent in one too recently.
Trackbacks are so abused now, unless you moderate them they are useless in showing who links to your posts. Being interconnected is important in blogging, but spammers have ruined trackbacks as they are now. Maybe a solution would be to have the blog software verify the trackback site actually linked to them. If the check doesn’t send a referrer, it would be hard for spammers to fake.