Comment and trackback spam

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten blasted by a bunch of trackback spam. Comment spam has been all but nonexistent since I installed James Seng’s SCode plugin. The new round of trackback spam enticed me to check out whether there had been updates to the popular MT-Blacklist plugin. There had been, so I installed the update.

Bam! I got a slew of new comment spam. I found it hard to believe that a human being would have entered all of that spam. So, I tested out my SCode plugin. I had forgotten that you have to add a small hack to the MT-Blacklist plugin to use it with SCode. Woops. I updated SCode, readding the hack in and should now be comment spam free again.

One plus, was that I discovered that James Seng has a clever solution for trackback spam. It double checks that the trackback is coming from the same server that the ping refers to. It’s not perfect, and will shut out some reasonable pings… but, there’s only so much time I want to devote to cleaning up trackbacks. (MT-Blacklist does a great job of that, but I’d rather not even deal with it.)