Slippery Roaches

It’s been a while since I’ve had to waste time dealing with comment spammers, thanks to Dr Dave and Spam Karma 2 plugin for WordPress.

However, on oneof my other WP blogs today, the number of spam roaches squeaking under SK2 has been disturnbing. Some tricks ntoed are:

(1) They are embedding only one URL, and usually that is the form field. So no slaps for excessive link count
(2) They are masking their spam URLs with services like TinyURL
(3) The comment text, usually gibberish, is somewhat relevant to the topic of the post.

So they are finding some ways around SK2. I’ve escalated the defenses by using the Sk2 Moderate PLugin (a plugin for a plugin!), that applies the WP options for discussion moderation if something passes by SK2. This means, I can check the boxes:

# An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)
# Comment author must fill out name and e-mail
# Comment author must have a previously approved comment

so that if it squeaks in, the last option will give me another change to zap ’em.

Again, in the pie in the sky mode, imaging if just some of the creative brainpower that goes into people writing spam code were actually applied to do some good in this freakin’ world. Yeah, dreamin’. Spammers spam and that is it.

And on another front, a note from Dr. Dave:

There seems to be a new class of spambot going around. Judging by my own logs, some people might have finally put in the time to code a proper, somewhat-intelligent, spambot, and/or specifically focused on working around SK2’s filters. Bad news is that it will likely fool any other spam plugin just the same; good news is that I have a whole bunch of tricks in reserve to strengthen SK2, should the need really arise. Either way, I am not even sure this recent wave isn’t the work of a bunch of idiots, wasting time behind their browser, so please do not panic yet.

Unfortunately, this comes at a very bad time since I am right in the middle of university finals, but I will post a detailed update in a few days.

IN my book, the good doctor gets an “A” for his efforts.

Make that an “A+”.

Make than an “A++++++++++++”

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