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Turning Off Trackbacks
A few days ago, I logged into my server and typed chmod 644 mt-tb.cgi. Yup, I turned off trackbacks. I found that even with a trackback Spam filter like MT-Blacklist, it was just getting to be too much. Dealing with it took time, I worried about missing some of the offensive crap, and, frankly, I just don’t want to look at it. This is an example of a great idea dealt a series of, perhaps fatal, body blows by the lack of a credible identity infrastructure on the Web.
Now, before you leave a comment saying “did you try X?”, understand that I’m willing to spend time setting something up, but I’m not willing to spend anymore of each day dealing with Spam. So, if requires substantial care and feeding, I’m not interested.
Posted by windley on July 21, 2005 2:17 PM
Comment from Frank Koehntopp at July 22, 2005 1:07 AM
I was having similar issues with referer spam lately, spiking up my traffic way over my limit. In search of a solution, I realised that 99 percent of the hits came through open proxies or certain IP ranges. I have since then implemented filters based on some of those IPs, and the situation has gotten considerably better. We should really have plugins for this for all the major blog software.
Comment from Jeff MacMichael at July 22, 2005 7:58 AM
There are a couple of nifty Moveable Type plugins which use SpamAssassin (which of course takes some training before it's hands-off, but works well after a short while).
http://www.kahunaburger.com/blog/archives/000189.html
http://www.hjackson.org/blog/archives/2004/11/moveable_type_s.html
For another interesting tactic, see IOERROR's "Bad Behavior" plugin for Wordpress, which uses user agent checking (among other things) to block spambots. It's PHP but something similar would be easy(ier?) in Perl.
http://www.ioerror.us/software/bad-behavior/
Comment from Phil Windley at July 22, 2005 10:50 AM
Brian Sweeting was telling me good things about Bad Behavior. The SpamAssassin tie-in sounds interesting, although I have to admit I'm not all that impressed with it on email. I'm running it with Baysian filtering and still get tons of crap.