MT-Blacklist still blocks a heck of a lot, but seems vulnerable to Trackback spam (vs Comment spam), largely because the “old post” forced moderation feature against Comment spam doesn’t apply to Trackback spam. Thus, after Margie’s game was over and I went back online, I discovered fifty-odd trackback spams, from the same pr0n yahoo who’s dropped by before, each time with subtle differences in his domain (as detailed here). I’ve started doing MT-B URL Patterns to block the obviously undesirable subdomains he’s using … and, as a counter to my frustration in seeing the large number that came through during the afternoon, there’s a certain satisfaction watching the “blocked” count on some of them start to immediately increment as he blithely continues to try, even after the door is barred.
Still eagerly looking forward to bulk despamming being put back into MT-B. It would make cleaning up the mess less irksome than it currently is (which is, to be sure, worlds less irksome than being without MT-B).
Holy freakin’ spamcrap on toast. After my little prophilaxis last night, I look in my blacklist log this a.m. and find 250 comments/trackbacks blocked by the subdomains I put in, and another 361 beyond that blocked by the primary domain dude was using.
Thank God I checked my blog last night!
(Whatever bot he’s running is smart enough to try it once every three minutes, beyond the normal throttle period. Creep.)
By the time dude-bot gave up last night, the score was 561 on the primary domain, another 470 blocked on the secondary domains. Yeesh.
I daily read of folks either turning off comments/trackbacks, or else getting out of blogging altogether, because of crap like this. And that’s the real “cost” of this sort of vandalism.