Spammers Find Their Way Through Blogs
Spammers had quickly found their way through our mailbox. Then came anti-spam tools appeared, allowing the Goods to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Today, as blogs quickly spread, spammers follow the trend and post their “insightful” contributions onto this new type of sites, adding their insidious messages in the list of comments. Movable Type, the very popular publishing system, is badly hit and has recently published an article praising Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist plugin, also mentioned on Luke Hutteman’s blog, SharpReader’s author.
Forums like phpBB are also hit as has been le Sauna: extraneous subscribers were appearing lately, all with email addresses whose domain was “mail.ru” and linking to a website proposing interesting products such as pregnancy tests. The answer was rather simple but not perfect: ban every user whose email address finishes with “mail.ru”. The door is still open to any other spammer to come and try to subscribe to the forum. Luckily enough, those users cannot post messages without their profile being validated before hand.
As an active member of “Cut spammers’ balls off” association, I can only applaude to Jay Allen’s move, even though I don’t use Movable Type (yet) and encourage any move in that direction.
