That fiendish spam :p
First there were the blogs. Then came the comment systems. And then came blog spam. In the old days when Blogger was new and "blog" wasn’t a buzzword, we didn’t have to deal with stuff like comment spam. We could go online, post our thoughts and that would be that. Now, I spend most of my time weeding out comment spam on my blog than I do on actually writing an entry :p
Of course, comment spam mutated into trackback spam and then pingback spam. For the longest time, I would get up in the morning and would have hundreds of trackback spam entries to wade through and to delete. I then developed the WPBlacklist plugin for WordPress and that made things a bit easier – it would automatically delete all comments, trackbacks and pingbacks marked as spam. But as these things have a tendency to do, spammers got smarter. Simple blacklisting wasn’t enough after a while. They would consistently get around blacklisting, again and again. So I switched WordPress plugins to combat the problem.
I installed Bad Behaviour for WordPress and Spam Karma. For a few months, I had no trackback spam attacks and whatever comment spam that came my way was caught by Spam Karma most of the time. That was till a week or so ago. Instead of a couple of spam messages a night, I suddenly started getting ten or so a night. And then a couple of days ago, I started getting trackback spam again. Now I get about fifty spam messages a night. This is still a far cry from the hundreds that I used to get nightly but it looks as if that I might be back to that soon if this trend continues.
So I have to conclude one of two things – I have either become very popular amongst spammers or Bad Behaviour is not as effective as it used to be. Spam Karma still does tag all of this as spam and does not display it on my blog but the problem is that I have to wade through all this spam in the morning and delete it since Spam Karma simply holds the spam – it does not automatically delete it. The authors of both Spam Karma and Bad Behaviour have said that spammers are becoming smarter in how they write they spambots. Perhaps this is just an indication that this is true. If so, then it’s time for the next generation of weapons in the anti-spam arsenal. I just hope they get here soon :p
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