Attack of the spam
Fri May 19, 2006 13:11 (UTC -5)The problem of automated comment spam on this blog was solved relatively easily. However, there still lurks a greater beast: trackback spam. Unlike comment spam, I can’t seem to stop trackback spam before it starts; it’s just a matter of pinging a server, you know.
Anyway, I typically get an odd trackback spam or two, but over the past couple of days, I’ve been getting hit with dozens of them at a time. Luckily, WordPress has sent them to me for approval, so they haven’t appeared on the site. Most of them come from different IP addresses, but they’re all very similar; each attack lasts for an hour or two and promotes spammy sites of a particular theme. For example, on Wednesday afternoon I got 46 trackback spams in an hour, and all had to do with betting. Early Thursday morning, I got about 33 of them in an hour, and the keyword was insurance. After waking up today to find that the site had caught 59 trackback spams on credit cards in less than two hours, I decided that I needed to take action.
I figured that I had been too lax on comment/tracback spam in the past. My policy was this: IP addresses that spam the blog once must receive my approval for future comments or trackbacks. For repeat offenders, I would ensure than any comment containing the IP addresses concerned would be nuked immediately. Comments containing spam-like keywords would also be subject to automatic deletion. But starting today, any IP address caught spamming this blog will be blacklisted so that it can’t do it again.
Even so, it’s going to be difficult to fight these onslaughts of trackback spam if I’m not around to detect them right away. It’s like a game: They spam, I block the IP addresses and keywords. Then we repeat. But the game is easier for me to win when I’m keeping watch during the day. For example, this morning I’ve basically stopped what I’m pretty sure is a hotel-related attack. But I need to make sure that WordPress can take care of this without me having to be around. I really don’t want to disable trackbacks, because I have received some — very, very few — and if I do that, then the spammers will win! If anybody knows of a good trackback spam plugin that works with WordPress 2.0, I’d be glad to hear of it.
Yesterday there was a sort of pep rally in the school auditorium. The idea was to give a farewell to our principal, who is retiring, and to promote the football game that was last night. I guess the idea of having a football game in May was to get some practice for the team, but I can state with certainty that they lost. Anyway, we usually have pep rallies on the football field, but no one really pays attention and everyone gets sunburned from being out there. It’s really hard not to pay attention in the auditorium. In fact, it was so loud in there that I practically went deaf, and I was sitting about halfway toward the back.
Comedians: need some topical fodder for your act? Check out Wikipedia’s list of articles with the most revisions. The 10 most revised articles (probably due to vandalizing and edit wars) are George W. Bush, Wikipedia, Jesus, United States, Adolf Hitler, Hurricane Katrina, World War II, RuneScape, Michael Jackson, and John Kerry. There’s enough controversy for everyone!
Here’s an interesting article: “Prime Numbers Get Hitched.” The article explores a possible link between mathematics and quantum physics via everyone’s favorite numbers, primes.
