JonahWeiland.com

May 18th, 2006

Comment/Trackback Spam

Posted by Jonah Weiland in General

Today I got a flood of comment and trackback spam on this here ol’ blog. What’s different this time is almost every bit of spam came from a different IP address. In the past, they’ve almost always been from the same IP address or the same class C (a set of 256 IP addresses). So, while I’ve banned all the IPs that posted spam today, I doubt that it’s really going to help all that much. Clealry spammers are either getting better at spoofing their addresses, or they really do have multiple open servers to work from.

If there’s anyone reading this who uses WordPress, do you have any suggestions on how to curb this a bit? Is there a plug-in that helps with this kind of stuff? This is annoying.

One Response to ' Comment/Trackback Spam '

Subscribe to comments with RSS

  1. Beau said:

    It’s apparently being done by computers that were botted by spyware, so it really is from multiple IPs.

    First off, turn off accepting pings. Almost no legit folks use them anyway.

    What I’ve been doing, in my lazy way, is every time I dump one of the spams into the spam filter, I go back and edit the old page to no longer accept pings. It’s not an instant fix — more will come later — but the window is steadily closing and I’m getting hit with fewer and fewer. (Luckily, I turned off my pings before 2006, so it’s only my older pages getting hit.)

    There’s been some new mods coming out to fix this, but none of them seem to be working great. There’s also something allegedly that can be done to turn off pings globally via MySQL, but in the wake of rebuilding my computer, I haven’t gotten around to bookmarking that page again. (If you decide to globally deactivate pings that way for your blog, could you do the same to my two as well, please?)

    This basically is another good argument for having good spyware protection, though.

    May 19th, 2006 at 12:57 pm

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.