Blog comment spammers have been having a hard time of it lately, given the new measures that people have been devising to render their links ineffective.
Of course, rendering spam links ineffective works only acts as a deterrent. It doesn’t stop your blog from filling up with rubbish and the genuine comments from being obscured. For that, you need something like MT-Blacklist or my own patch to MovableType 2.661.
After seeing the effectiveness of their efforts dwindle, it seems the spammers have now discovered trackbacks and are using those to propagate their evil links. Last night, I was hit with a major attack for the first time.
After writing a quick Perl script to clean up the mess, I hacked on TBPing.pm to make it use the same bad_words file that my comment spam patch uses. Hopefully, this will put a stop to the trackback spammers before they can really get started. We’ll see. If the patch proves effective, I’ll post it here.