(Updated post; originally posted March 2, 2006.)
Hi all. Unfortunately, our efforts to convince al-Qaeda that they should be murdering spammers around the world and beheading them on video (charge 25 cents per view on Internet video, it would even be a profit center) haven't borne fruit yet. Couple of quick bulletins, therefore:
- We've had to block all blogspot.com trackbacks - and unfortunately, that means all blogspot.com links in comments as well. Spammers are obviously generating blogspot blogs in an automated way, and we were getting about 1,000 of those spams per week. Note that Blogspot links will still work normally in author posts. (N.B. the flood of auto-gen blogs has largely stopped, so we're lifting that ban and we'll see what happens.)
Speaking of authors:
- A member of the team who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty accepted all of the extracted URLs when processing a spam message in MT-Blacklist. The result was that any comment with ".." was being blocked. Advisory to team members: if an extracted URL has ANY "..." in it, UNCHECK it. It's never a complete URL, and will only cause problems later.
At least our installed Honey Pot continues to work well. Finally, some quick advice for fellow MT-Blacklist users:
If you use Blacklist as part of your system (we found SpamLookup had insuperable problems), the following strings should be entered. I've been looking at our spam logs, and the number of posts blocked is VERY high:
- "fuck"
- "hentai"
- "casino" (you may also block "poker" - we had to).
- ".info" (yes, ALL of this top-level domain; enter it as a "String")