Alden Bates' Weblog

Here's an interesting comment spam attempt. The spammer loaded a post, then attempted to comment to it (in the same second) but fell for the fake comment form which normal surfers don't see because it's commented out in the source. The interesting part was that the referrer they userd when fetching the post seemed to indicate that they had come from an email in a web-based mailbox. The spammers are sharing URLs, perhaps?

Also today I got around to banning Mr 195.95.219.6, who's been trackback spamming me for a while now using the user agent "Net::Trackback/1.01". I'm not banning on user agent as Net:Trackback appears to be a Perl project to enable people to create Trackback applications more easily and therefore it's not necessarily true that anyone using it will be a spammer. I wonder if the creator knows his work is being used for evil purposes. This spammer appears to be using one IP address all the time, so until they discover open proxies, I'll be safe from them for a while.

With the increasing amount of trackback spam, it's no wonder people are claiming Trackback is dead. So far, over the life of this weblog, I've had one legitamite trackback... Of course, I probably just need to be more interesting. :) I don't think trackback is dead, I think it just needs to adapt.