Came down this morning for a bite to eat before going off to a training session on contemplative discernment. Discerned that someone was in the middle of a trackback ping spam attack on this blog. Ran a couple of them through despamming, deleted the rest — and sat here and watched as additional pings crashed against the blacklist. Hah!
My biggest worry is how I’m going to handle that while away on business and vacation. Trackbacks in particular cannot be easily turned off, and MT-Blacklist doesn’t moderate them (for semi-obvious reasons), which creates an annoying window of opportunity.
Still, though it’s not doing much for contemplative state of mind at the moment, I’m feeling rather satisfied.
UPDATE: Whilst I was gone, dude burned up another six hours of futile additional attempts with the same strings. Again, I say: Hah!
UPDATE: Fifteen hours after I initially blocked this guy, and the blacklist log shows his processes still splashing against the filters, once every minute or two now. Over five hundred today. Jeez.
Oh, the kitten pictures are heartwarming.
What is it with comment spam and trackback spam? I’m not being bothered today much (my those nannies at Typepad are efficient), but Joanne Jacobs and TNH at Making light are both being assaulted–and talking about it.
Happy Halloween.
Joanne Jacobs:
http://www.joannejacobs.com/mtarchives/014550.html
ML:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005664.html#005664
Kottke, months ago, with gratuitous Star Wars reference:
http://www.kottke.org/04/01/trackback-spam
Nerdly flexing:
http://www.hutteman.com/weblog/2004/07/02-197.html
Pretty decent links. Thanks, Elise.
I note that trackbacks are ostensibly throttled by the OneHourMaxPings (default 10) and OneDayMaxPings (default 50) in mt.cfg. In MT3, these are total; in MT2 they are by IP address (and so fairly useless). Phil Ringnalda documents these pretty well (though they do lurk in the MT docs somewhere)
Thing is, I’m pretty sure I’ve been receiving them faster and furiouser than that (but not 100% positive). I’ve explicitly added the values to my mt.cfg file, though, just in case.
ThrottleSeconds can also throttle the pings, but it throttles comments and pings with the same value, which is not terribly helpful.