Posted on by graybo

New variant spam

A new and worrying variant of comment spam has hit my site this morning – just a single spam comment so far, but it was sufficiently unusual for me to look at it closely before hitting the "delete" button.
The spam itself contains the usual "I think your site is great" crap and a link, telling me to scroll half-way down for a recipe. Now, this is the sort of thing that I might do, but I usually check that the link is not to some pr0n or cas1n0 site before clicking, particularly as the link has come from a stranger (and consequently went straight to moderation for me to review).
In fact, the link is to a legitimate weblog, specifically to this post. As you can see, I’m not the only one to have experienced this.
It seems that the comment spammer is trying to pollute comment spam blacklists by getting valid websites blacklisted. This would have the obvious consequence of rendering blacklists useless and reducing the value of anti-comment spam tools and plugins. This is a worrying development.
You can read more about it at The Net Is Dead. The advice is to carefully check comments left at your site and do not blacklist legitimate sites and URIs.
Personally, I find this all immensely tiresome. I had reduced the problem of comment spam to a minor nuisance, but now I’m back to getting 50 to 100 comment spams per day. This is not why I have a website – to wage a constant war on idiots is not why grayblog is here. A more timid soul might throw in the towel in the face of all this crap. It seems that waging this war is the price I must pay for subjecting you all to my words and pictures.
Some might argue that it’s a fair deal!

9 Replies to “New variant spam”

  2. Karen, insiduous isn’t a word, but insidious is. *grin*

    Graybo, I swear by Bad Behavior at the moment, it seems to be blocking one hell of a lot of stuff before it even gets to me (well, according to my error logs, and the number of 412 errors it chucks out now).

    Give it a go – nowt to lose, all to gain!

  4. Yep – I’ve been looking at Bad Behavior too. Personally, I really wanted to find something called Bad Behaviour, but it doesn’t seem to exist.

  5. If you can get access to your server and it is running Apache, I found this blog by some guy (originally located here: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=2904), and I quote:

    Here is the short code running on the ctyme server for my dvorak.org using WordPress-based blogging software. Altering it for other blog software and other blogs should be simple for anyone running Apache.

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^.*dvorak.org/.*
    RewriteRule ^.* http://www.ctyme.com/comment-spam.html

    Essentially it makes the basic condition for any post rigid: it has to be coming from a link within the blog itself, the “commentâ€? link. Most spam does not.

  6. fyi – some of that above code didn;t come out like it should be written for apache, defintely check uot the site above. hope it helps.

  8. I agree, I’d like Bad Behaviour rather than Behavior, but that’s Americans for you.

    However, despite its abysmal use of *ahem* English, the actual program (ooh look, there’s another one) seems to work really well.

  9. i tried the link rofm your comments and it worked, give her another go, if it doesn;t work i will put an example up on my site or email it to you or some such.

Comments are closed.