Blog comment spammers moving to Trackbacks?
Published by on January 26th, 2005
The next time you are landed with a blog comment spam, do a quick link: search on Google and you’ll generally find endless archived blog pages which have been successfully hit.
But spammers are still not satisfied. Blocking comment spam using any number of barriers on your blog has pushed the more creative spammers over to spamming using Trackbacks. Trackbacks are much harder to automatically moderate as there are no form fields being submitted within which we can search for particular excluded words or phrases.
This blog, and others I run, have all Trackbacks and pingbacks sent directly to a moderation queue for approval - thankfully I do not get overloaded with them. If you are using WordPress, the Trackback and Pingback moderation plugins can be found at: MtDewVirus. A discussion about Trackback spam can be found at Photo Matt.
Comments themselves here are also moderated currently while I assess a good anti-spam solution. I’m having some technical issues with CAPTCHA, and although simple to use I would prefer not to force users to input yet another form field. However, I came across WP Hashcash this morning and it looks intriguing. I’ll install it here in the next few days and report back on its effectiveness.
3 Responses to “Blog comment spammers moving to Trackbacks?”
January 26th, 2005 at 11:16 am
I just downloaded WP Hashcash and threw it into my plug-ins directory. Sounds cool, but I’ll need time to do the manual php changes to properly activate it. Unless you get there first, I’ll let you know how it goes. I might even let you be the first to comment with it in place… *grin*
jEN
January 26th, 2005 at 1:26 pm
Correction: I downloaded the plug-in improperly the first time around, so after a second grab and install, *poof*, it installed painlessly. The only prob with it isn’t a problem at all… I know it’s working, but I can’t see it working, so how do I know it’s working? Argh! The madness!!
Thanks for the tip, Neil!
jEN
January 26th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
Spam: eat me.
Spam. Everyone makes fun of it. No one admits to eating it, let alone, liking it… Oh, but I did.
Years ago, long before the day I gave up meat, I liked Spam. I ate Spam-burgers; I ate it straight from the tin; I fried it up in butter and loved what…