It’s been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches… mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up.
You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you– especially if the body of the comment is:
Nice Post!
The tell-tale is the effort to place URLs to un-wanted sites (and DO NOT CLICK and VISIT any of those URLs)… what these cretins are trying to do is to increase their Google Ranking by spreading links on other pages.
The MTBlacklist allows one click de-spamming, removal of the bad comment, and adding the URL to the Blacklist for future protection. It had been a while since I went to the Comment Spam Clearninghouse and added the Latest Master Blacklist file to our Blacklist and Woah Neo! there was about 340 we were short.
Meanwhile, tonight’s cockroach droppings indcluded 12 URLs not on the Masterlist, and a traceroute found the offending source IP (205.177.122.2) a customer of BtNAccess– time will tell if a meesage to their abuse line will yield one squashed roach.
Alan, watch out for the spam roaches. They’re getting smarter. Evolving, almost.
One hit my blog, and added enough URLs in the post that it choked the blacklist cgi.
Another one added an additional
What I really want is a spamRetaliation plugin for MT (and Mail.app, for that matter), that detects spam and goes out and smacks down the offending spammer…
Ouch! Well roaches are on of the oldest species from ancestors that crawled out of the Devonian seas (I am probably wrong with the Geological reference), because they are so hardy, resilient… and crunchy.
That’s too bad about the severe attack. I have found (I think) that closing down the comments after 30 days has closed quite a few doors. The ultimate price would be closing comments completely, something I would loathe to do as that level of communication is key to blogging (in my mind).
I guess we just need to be ever vigilent with that can of Raid!
I’ve had some comments lately in which all the tell-tale signs of blog spam (phony email addresses, “nice post”, etc…) but there is no URL entered. If indeed the point of Blogspamming is to push out links and increase a Google ranking, this behaviour mystifies me… Are the roaches evolving?