Finally updated the blog banner to something that was actually taken in the same state! (The old one was in Hawaii.)
Tag: blog
Comment Barrier
Pet peeve: Blogs that require you to register locally in order to comment. Yes, that means you, suvudu.com and androidcommunity.com
Tired of Pingback Spam
Bad Behavior and Spam Karma do a good job of fighting most of the spam that hits this site, but over the last few weeks I’ve seen a (relatively) new kind that seems to require manual intervention: pingback spam.
It took a long time for spammers to really start abusing pingbacks, because of two things: First, pingbacks require the remote site to link to your site before they can get you to link to theirs. Second, it was just so much easier to abuse trackbacks and ordinary comments. I guess those have gotten locked down enough that it’s worth the effort to target pingbacks now. Continue reading
Trackback spam is back
I’m surprised it took so long, but trackback spammers seem to have finally figured out that they can sail past the simplest check against trackback spam—does the calling page actually link to the page being trackbacked?–by temporarily adding that link.
Or maybe they have for a while, and they’ve only just started getting past my other layers of defense (namely Bad Behavior and other checks by Spam Karma).
*sigh*
Apparently, it *is* a challenge
Every once in a while, a comment spam manages to get past both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma. Oddly enough, it always seems to be on the same entry: “Abuse Contact” is not an invitation.
I guess spammers like a challenge as much as anyone else.