Although I’ve not had a lot of time for posting, I’m still having to fiddle behind the scenes to keep this site free of spam. 

Every couple of days some gomer with a zombie farm hits the old Movable Type installation with a bunch of poker trackback spams.  They don’t last any longer than it takes for me to smite them with MT Blacklist, but it’s still annoying to deal with.

However, this morning I noticed a new and more insidious form of comment spam.  Someone hit the EE weblog with comments that included links to weird spamlike Blogspot domains, which included numbers in the names.  Given the way EE’s Blacklist works, these don’t seem to get filtered, even if I add the domains to the Blacklist.  I’m not sure why.  Luckily there weren’t many of them and I deleted them within minutes of them being added.  I did find it slightly ironic, however, that one of the entries that got hit was about Spamming Bastards.

The other thing that seems to show up a lot lately are referral spams.  I’ve shut down most of them by blacklisting their common keywords and domains, but I discovered an ingenious new form of referral spam today.  Instead of directly putting their domain into the referral (which was getting them blacklisted or shut down) they put a Google search with their keywords in there.  This way it makes it look like someone landed on my weblog using those search terms.  Anyone hitting my referral page will see those search terms, and if they click on the referrer will land on a Google search page that highlights the spammer’s sites.  It’s an indirect Googleback referrer spam. 

I’ve removed them by blocking their keywords (somehow I don’t see a legitimate need for me to get referrals for “trixieteen” or similar nonsense).