Unethical idea of the day: Write a web crawler that grabs the list of recently updated MovableType or Blogger weblogs, and posts a spam comment to every weblog entry. Sound too far-fetched? Maybe not; a porn site recently spammed Andrew Burke’s weblog. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone automates the process and ruins online community forever. (Or at least until someone writes a SpamAssassin plugin for weblogs.)
Comments
Comments are closed.
Agree with you. A spam assasin not only for blogs but for all sites.
Sounds like an all-nighter’s worth of coding for the right miscreant. 🙂
And why should blog comments be any different from bbs’s, usenet, bulletin boards or mailing lists? Eventually as traffic increases the wide swath of humanity will come, and with it will come the need for policing — lest they get swamped with stupid behavior.
(visiting via mathowie)
Well, an easy way out.. already being used by some places like Paypal(?). At the comment section, display a random number in image format, i.e display the number 123 as three a gif image and ask the writer to note down this number as one field.
That should take care of a lot of spamming, shouldn’t it?
Thanks for the idea. Should have that thing working by, ooh, Thursday evening?
People have come up with scripts like that for subprofile.com guestbooks and spammed porn into them, which can get very annoying. It seems to have died down though, I think the guestbook signing format has changed.
I have experienced the same problem before some time. The solution called astatspam.
You can find the script here : http:// www. thetop sites.net/referer_spam/
This script connects to a daily updated span database and enters some directives to your .htaccess files, so your site will deny access to the spammers.