tecosystems

Spam Related Notes

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Just a few spam related items I wanted to raise here in case there are any questions. They may be relevant to either readers here, or other folks running their own blogging software.

First, domains ending in .info are hereby banned for the foreseeable future. For those of you with legitimate .info domains, I’m sorry that some bad apples ruined it for everyone, but over the weekend we were spammed by nearly 50 new domains ending in .info – with tens of comments per domain – so I’ve set up a URL pattern to deny any and all .info domains until things calm down a bit.

Second, trackbacks. I wrote most recently on the subject here, but basically I’m conceding defeat for the moment until I have more time to hunt through various forums for other tips and tricks. Basically any time I turn off TrackbankAntiSpam, we get buried. Quickly. MT-Blacklist (2.04b) for reasons that are not clear to me is doing next to nothing to block Trackbacks that match known bad strings and URIs, with only an odd ping denial here and there. I also tried another plugin called MT-Moderate, but that had no discernable affect either. So unfortunately, TrackbackAntiSpam is here to stay meaning that many of your legitimate pings will be denied. My apologies for any inconvenience, and in the meantime I’d suggest comments as a way (inconvenient as it is) of letting us know about related posts.

Any questions, you know where to find me.

Update: Ok, apparently there’s one thing left for me to try. My last, best hope is Brad Choate’s new SpamLookup plugin that filters both Comment and TrackBack spam. As of right now, I’ve turned off the TrackbackAntiSpam plugin to see if the new SpamLookup is any more effective. Will let you know what the results are. Would also appreciate a TrackBack to see if it’s working.

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