Spammed, again
I really really really hate spam. It’s not creative marketing. It’s not affordable advertising. It’s a cheap, dirty plague spreading all over the Internet. Spammers, I hope you will catch some rare disease that makes you constantly bang your heads against the keyboards until you die!! Mwahahahahahaha!!
I thought I had this blog protected with two levels of defense: Gudlyf’s AuthImage image verification and an e-mail verification. But they were gone since I upgraded to WordPress 1.5, which left my blog unprotected. Just days later, spam bots started attacking my blog again with online casino ads. At least I should be thankful it wasn’t some sick porn.
So I got Gudlyf’s AuthImage installed again. To my pleasant surprise, it’s a completely new version, has lots of improvements, works great, it’s easier to set up… but soon enough I found out that it didn’t help. There wasn’t anything wrong with it. Why didn’t it work? Because spammers weren’t using the comment posting feature of the blog, as revealed by my web host’s server logs. Instead, the automatic spam robots searching the Internet for WordPress blogs were accessing the TrackBack feature, which allows my blog to be notified when someone else references my Random Synapses in a post on his or her blog. And this TrackBack doesn’t use the authentication image.
Furthermore, the sneaky spam bots use insecure proxies to send messages, so it’s a constant cat and mouse game. I could spend all day blocking source IP addresses used by spammers and they’ll still be one step ahead. I needed something powerful, yet smart. Something that checks if the sender is listed in one of the international spammer databases. Something that won’t keep me glued to the chair to approve or delete messages from the moderation queue. Something that could protect my blog’s comments and trackback yet make it simple for friends to use the system legitimately. Hopefully, Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma will do all that.
*sigh*
Oh, did I mention that I hate spam? 
March 11th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
I also had some spambots nail me within a few days of getting the server back online and WP1.5 installed. I deleted those by hand — easily done since they were in the moderation queue — but I took Titel and Jostein’s advice and installed Spam Karma, which seems to be doing its’ job wonderfully.