« International Job Search? | Main | Get Your Foundation Laid People »
Argh, Maties! Bloody Spammers Be Improvin'!
Spam spam spam!
How I loathe spam.
All day all night,
try as I might,
I just can't stop the damn spam!
So have you seen the new comment spam technique? The spammer signs the comment w/an average sounding name (rather than the usual random numbers and digits gibberish) and uses a legitimate blog URL for the “return” url field. The links in the body of the comment are also legit—they go to what appear to be legitimate and innocent blogs. And that's it. But the text of the comment doesn't make logical sense. It starts w/the usual stuff like “I really like your site” or whatever, but then it will just have a couple of these links and some nonsense text. Fine. It looks like spam, but fairly harmless spam. So why would this be worth a spammer's time if it doesn't even point to any spam-like URLs?
The spam URLs are hidden! I don't know how they do it, but the comment itself does not show that there are additional spam links buried in it somehow. However, when you run it through Blacklist, the spam URLs show up to be blacklisted. How do they do that?
I need to upgrade this MT install to MT 3.2! For those who have upgraded, are you finding your spam woes have decreased?
Posted October 4, 2005 08:48 AM | meta-blogging
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mowabb.com/mt32/mt-tb.cgi/4672
No. I also had to uninstall Blacklist, so I'm only using SpamLookup. If you're on 3.x but not 3.2, I'd stay.
Posted by: A. Rickey at October 4, 2005 10:14 AM
Yes! 3.2 is awesome.
Posted by: Katherine at October 4, 2005 10:17 AM
Not only are the getting trickier, but it seems to be even more prevalent. I used to get a few comment spams... up until last week, when I started get 30 a day.
And to quote The Daily Show, it isn't spam... it's High Volume Deployment Advertising
Posted by: Unreasonable Man at October 4, 2005 02:17 PM
Since I've upgraded to 3.2 I have only gotten the tiniest trickle of spam, and the filters have caught all of it.
As usually, the documentation from Six Apart for the upgrade is abysmal; however, it's not too bad of an install. I'd recommend it.
Posted by: Dave! at October 4, 2005 03:24 PM
Ambimb:
One more thing to think of, before you upgrade. How do you host the rest of the Coop? That might cause some additional problems.
Posted by: A. Rickey at October 4, 2005 09:01 PM
Since upgrading to 3.2, I deal with about 4 or 5 uncaught spams per day with extremely few false positives (one or two per week). We've got ostensibly the best spam-fighting team in the whole world working on Movable Type and TypePad and we built the system to work.
Dave, we've improved the user manual drastically. Give is a second look and sorry that it wasn't up to snuff the first time around. We definitely dropped the ball on that while we were working so hard on manking sure that 3.2 was the most bug free release we've ever had.
Posted by: Jay Allen ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://mowabb.com/ai/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 5, 2005 06:12 AM
Oh, also, when you upgrade, remove MT-Blacklist. It's neither compatible with 3.2 or necessary.
I know that thought might scare you, but believe me, you'll be delighted with the built-in spam protection of MT 3.2.
Posted by: Jay Allen at October 5, 2005 06:14 AM
