Spam breeds more spam
As an experiment, I left two typical comment spams in one of my entries (now deleted) only long enough to be archived by Google. I was curious what would happen. In less than 24 hours since the original comment spam arrived the entry was spammed, nay, bombarded with 356 brand new spam comments.
The spammer found my entry via google searching for one of the couple dozen urls spammed in the comment body. Here is a screenshot of what google cache was still showing today. (The spam was actually removed already). That was pretty fast, wasn't it? In other words: Unremoved spam + fast google caching = lots more spam. Obviously just removing the comments is no longer good enough, time to work on preventing them from arriving in the first place (I have a hangup about using mod_perl, so no mt_blacklist). |
Comments
Eeeeks, that's scary! Maybe something like MT-Moderate, set to only 1 or 2 days??
Posted by: Tricia | January 8, 2005 11:54 PM
Interesting. This confirms something I've suspected for a long time now.
Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny | January 8, 2005 11:55 PM
This is really interesting feedback, we'll take this into account. And I'll give Jay some more grief about Blacklist not running under mod_perl on your behalf.
Posted by: Anil Dash | January 9, 2005 03:19 AM
Thats actually pretty smart thinking on the part of the spammer. Being cached in google must of flipped on the "spam more!" light for them.
Posted by: david | January 9, 2005 06:12 AM
This sounds like the Broken Window Theory[1] applies to web sites just as much as neighborhoods. Comment spammers will gravitate to poorly tended blogs...
1: http://www.cityofseattle.net/police/prevention/Tips/broken_window.htm
Posted by: George Hotelling | January 9, 2005 11:03 AM
It only kind of makes sense to me. I mean you'd expect them to conserve resources if they're running a script on a computer used for other stuff. But realistically that can't last, surely? Where's the benefit for them in only spamming places where it definitely gets through when the cost of spamming everyone drops?
Posted by: Tom Coates | January 9, 2005 05:48 PM
I think that just blocking domains isn't good enough.
There are virtually millions of spam domains. I believe they use some automated software to post on all the blogs they can reach.
The only reasonable option can be authentication. TypeKey is one of them.
Posted by: Schlank Jetzt | January 11, 2005 07:13 PM
If i remember correctly, I had gotten mt_blacklist mostly working with mod_perl, and was surprised nobody else tried.
It looked, to me, that it was purely because he was trying to use the CGI module with the Apache object already taking over or something like that.
Posted by: Gavin | January 12, 2005 04:49 PM
I'm convinced that public proxy servers are responsible for 95%+ of all comment spam. If we determine accurately that a comment has been submitted via a public proxy it should help to avoid those 95%+. I'm testing a much better version of http://www.kahunaburger.com/blog/archives/000191.html right now and it looks very promising. As soon as it had a burn-in on my site, I'm gonna post it. It'll run under mod_perl, because it runs under mod_perl on my site :-)
Posted by: Tobias Hoellrich | January 14, 2005 07:19 PM