dekstop: weblog

There is another wave of comment spam coming to my site -- the new variant, where they don't post their own URLs any more, but either URLs that aren't active yet, or URLs of blogs that have already been infiltrated with comment spam.

The rationale behind that: I'm supposed to not be put off by the usually offtopic comments and broken grammatical structure and leave them alone, which increases the PageRank of the URLs posted, which in turn increases the PageRank of all pages these URLs link to. Comment spam by indirection.

Here's the kicker: they are already putting quite some effort behind this, but make the mistake of reusing the same couple of URLs over and over in their comments. That, of course, can easily be caught by MT-Blacklist (which, btw, is a godsend for someone like me who is still using an ancient MovableType version. Thanks to Jay Allen for keeping the downloads up, seriously). During the last 24 hours, 45 comments have been caught linking to the same 5 URLs over and over.

Excerpt of my MovableType log. Note the varying IP addresses of comment sources -- their comments all link to the same URLs.

I can't imagine how it'll be when the next generation of comment spam tools appears, and they'll have unique URLs and unique text for each new spam comment they post. The only other line of defense we have then, it seems, is referer checking (which spammers already can bypass easily), and IP blacklists (which are of questionable value, and are also being bypassed already by distributed spam bots). Oh yeah, and captchas...

I'm looking forward to daily manual filtering again. My only hope is that spammers will learn to distinguish between deserted blogs and blogs that are actively maintained, and will eventually leave the latter alone.

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