Frell

Looks like comment spam is beginning to seep in here. Over the last week, I’ve had four or five comments pop up that were innocuous “Hey, nice post” types of things. Problem is, what they’re really here to do is put their URL in the comments, which then bumps up their Google pagerank, which makes their site more successful.

Feh.

In other words, we’re not talking about harvesting e-mail addresses here, or getting people to click through to their sites. It’s all about Google pageranks.

Hrm.

Let’s see if I can do some selective stamping out, before wheeling out the MT-Blacklist big guns …

UPDATE: Went ahead with MT-Blacklist, for a variety of reasons. Instalation was as close to painless as humanly possible. Turned it on, started inspecting past comments …

Holy crap.

I’ve mentioned I’d not been paying much attention to the Thursday Thumb-Twiddler before I shut it down. Evidently I’m the only one who wasn’t, because there were at least a hundred or more Evil Spam Comments — of the list-a-bunch-of-porn-site types — lurking in there. Jeez!

Well, that’ll larn me.

I’ll see how the blacklist works for the nonce. I’m not sure if I need or want to put a little warning by the comments about it. Hopefully anyone who gets incorrectly blocked will give me a holler.

The keen thing about MT-Blacklist and the approach it takes is that it’s not focused on content per se. That means that you can talk about all sorts of nasty stuff in the comments and not have it blocked (for those occasions where such subjects come up). It’s blocking, for the most part, evil URLs, because that’s the key to comment spam.

Though here’s an interesting one I ran across today — comments that lead you to something that looks like it’s a normal blog (it’s often ripped off from one) — but whose comment links, etc., all go to evil URLs. It’s an attempt to fight against this sort of blacklisting, since it still uses the Google PageRanks (a site removed) to promote evil sites, but it’s subject to the same kind of detection and blacklisting. This has been known to come up in e-mails, too, hoping to get you to blogroll a faux blog that way.

Evil.

UPDATE 2: All seems to be working well. I’ve reinstalled the hacks for no duplicate comments and no duplicate trackbacks, and those seem to be working well, too.