The Net is Dead

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

Me vs. the Spammers: 0-1

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Sunday Aug 14 2005

I hate to make the confession I'm about to make but I have to be honest here. I, the creator of Pivot-Blacklist, the anti-spam extension for Pivot have just taken off all 'last referers' lists off my various installations of Pivot. I've tried, I think I've fought well but at this time it's a 0-1 score for the spammers...

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It seems referer spam is impossible to eliminate from my weblogs. No matter how well the blacklist is tuned and tweaked for this purpose, those who offer child porn, sites about piss and poo sex, bestiality, sex with elderly women, loans, online casinos and other crap no one on earth would want to appear on their weblogs are simply too quickly in buying new domains for spamming purposes. While it's certainly possible to eliminate say 80-90% or more referer spam from your blog with Pivot Blacklist I feel every failed block is one too many. Just a few of incest-sites on my blogs are well... just a few too many for me. While I'm not saying I'm giving up I must admit I feel at least temporarily defeated by the assholes who pollute the internet with this crap. Sad... but true. I guess we have to live with it. Referer spam is here and it's here to stay, at least for quite a while I'm afraid...

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Commentary

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At 15 August '05 - 08:22 weefselkweekje wrote:
Perhaps you should have a look at Spam Karma’s approach. With it, my WordPress based blogs are 99.9% spam free, and the ones that it lets through are bearly distinguishable as spam.
At 15 August '05 - 09:01 Marco wrote:
That’s normal commentspam. In that area the Pivot-Blacklist is 100% effective. This posting was about referer spam.
At 15 August '05 - 13:03 Twotone wrote:
Well Marco, I have been a happy blacklist user for a long time now. But since today I get tons of comment spam on my site again. I have all the Pivot Blacklist option activated, but for some reason the Silly Question, the OSA and all the IP blocks dont keep off the spam anymore. Any idea’s?
At 15 August '05 - 13:17 Marco wrote:
Twotone, my best guess is that you might have upgraded Pivot and forgot to change submit.php again to apply the blacklist check before accepting a comment. Could that be the case?
At 15 August '05 - 13:19 Twotone wrote:
Yeah, I just came to the same conclusion… stupid me…. well good we came to the same conclusion at the same time. Thanks for replying so fast. Lest kill all spam again!!
At 15 August '05 - 16:00 Simon wrote:
Hmm, indeed sad. I recently went through the list of referers and added about a hundred keywords to the blacklist. It worked for… several days. Surely there are less spam-referers now, but already they’re slipping through… Nevertheless, the blacklist is perfect. And again: thanks for that. :) It can’t be said enough.

And maybe I will try referer whitelisting, since the referers on the frontpage are there for my visitors, personally I check them somewhere else. Visitors don’t need to know every referer, most important, imo, is that they see a clean list.
At 15 August '05 - 22:02 Twotone wrote:
Hey I fixed the problem. I now hope that I am rid of all the comment spam. Than I can start my battle against the referrer spam! Wish me luck… luckily I can back myself up with all the great suggestions I get from here… hear hear hear for marco!
At 16 August '05 - 21:35 Bung Phê wrote:
I know what you mean Marco. As i refuse to pay for more bandwidth than my actual 7 GB (!), i expect to be offline one of these days untill the end of this month.

So be it then. Let’s hope we’ll find a solution for these f#ck-%ps. Too bad man, too bad….

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