If you’re wondering what the weblog comment spammer plan of attack is, they are discussing it out in the open. The best part is that when one spammer accuses another of being too ethical, the other gets defensive:
>You’re becoming too ethical and
>that is stopping you from doing better than you can.
You assume too much, when it comes to making money I lower my ethics
considerably. What I don’t have though is unlimited time and so I put
my time where I believe long term it will produce most rewards and
right now I don’t see spamming blogs, guestbooks etc… giving long
term rewards.
I had a comment spam the other day. Blech. These people really are the lowest form of life on earth.
I got hit last weekend. It turns out the spammer had hijacked a small company’s Citrix server and was running the script from there, so I contacted their IT dept. that Monday and let them know that they’d been cracked and that their reputation was at risk.
There seem to be some fairly easy ways to deal with comment spam.
Of course, you could do what I detail at http://trikuare.cx/mt/archives/000425.php but that’s a bit of overkill for simple spam killing (I had other reasons to want to move to phpBB), but for a few days as an interim solution (which seemed to work well according to my logs) I did: http://trikuare.cx/mt/archives/000410.php
Anyway. Some of the comments on that thread were pretty funny. Like how the spammers seem to think that weblog authors aren’t actually clamping down on spam, and that the smarter ones aren’t figuring out simple ways to make their efforts useless anyway (for example, adding phpBB’s memberlist.php and so on to robots.txt), not to mention they’re not figuring out that all they’re going to do is cause more problems in the long run.
I’m very tempted to post to one of their threads about how if they really want to direct people to their site, maybe they should make a well-constructed site advertising things people ACTUALLY WANT TO BUY, since that’s always going to be the guaranteed best way to show up in Google for pertinent search queries (and why they want to spam non-pertinent search queries is beyond me, since all it does is lower the value of the Internet as a whole).
BTW, it would be really nice if MT sites all said whether they auto-convert URLs or if they allow HTML. It’s also rather stupid how it’s a mutually-exclusive option, and leaves the user guessing (and 50% of the time leads to either unlinked URLs or nonsensical non-linky text). Horrible interface design.
overkill solution
simple but effective solution
Or just use http://www.spamfighter.com it´s free and the problem is solved….