Alden Bates' Weblog

A particularly annoying comment spammer seems to have decided to target my site - the same one who's been spamming legitimate blog URLs. I blocked a bunch of open proxies in my .htaccess file last night, but still had some 74 comments get through overnight. Of those, 38 ended up in the junk folder, 35 were moderated, and 1 got through.

I'd added some phrases to SpamLookup last night as well, but I must have done them wrong, as SpamLookup didn't match them in the comments. I changed the phrases to regular expressions instead, and hopefully that should lower the number of comments that escape the junk folder. I've also added a bunch more open proxies to the .htaccess, and (temporarily) lowered the limits for moderating/junking comments based on number of URLs.

The spams typically start with a piece of generic praise, some random gibberish, then a raw URL, and a piece of random text linked to another URL. The URLs are usually entries from innocent blogs (either the spammers are intending to spam those entries at a later date, or perhaps they just want to muddy the waters of spam blacklists. Example comment openings are:

• your site is exactly the kind of sites which make the net surfing so fun. keep scrolling down for pastry cream recconsequentlyipe:
• Just letting you know - your site is fantastic! 1 small clove garlic:
• your site is a very nice source of info. extensive methods for this:
• brilliant site! happy to be here. about a year ago i started:
• Reading your content just made my day. Keep the good work. quilt Your fabric yoyo:

The text before the ':' seems to be used a lot, so adding those to blacklists should help. There's also a wee discussion going on in the comments of the spammed entries on Andrew's Blog.