The fight against spam continues and even ramps up into high gear, as this blog creeps up in search engine ranks. Those of you who have your own hosting may have noticed the increase in “referrer spam”. Unlike comment spam, which sorta serves a (nefarious) purpose, referrer spam is annoying and largely pointless. If you check your referrer logs, you will see what I mean. In the first two months of this year, we’ve already received hundreds of hits from fairly bogus sites that seek to hawk pr0n and drugs. This uses bandwidth, skews referrer stats and logs, and is just plain annoying, so if you have this problem, you may want to check out the new Referrer Karma. I believe it works for both MovableType and WordPress (and probably other blogging platforms, too) and it’s by the same guy who made Spam Karma (the two can actually work in tandem to execute a 56-hit combo). In case you’re wondering, the Sea Slugs! anti-spam sentai group is composed of:
- Spam Karma: Very powerful and flexible, with some fun stats in it. Let me know if the backup captcha is getting annoying; it’s only supposed to kick in some of the time. Sadly, it is currently set to “Strict”.
- Referrer Karma: Like the younger twin of Spam Karma, it stops referrer spam at the gates. Again, please let me know if you are getting blocked coming from any legit sites. So far I have only had one incident where a visitor coming from Ten’s site got a 403, and since them I have updated the whitelist.
- Spaminator: Kitty’s trusty plugin is the backup protection.
- Packaged WP Anti-Spam Measures: It’s gotten much more powerful and now bans known open proxies.
- One Large Assassin Beachball-mech: I haven’t figured out how to power this one yet… do I have to be a servant of Orochi first or something?
This post was written by...
Kabitzin – who has written 1970 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.
One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
At some point in early January, I stopped getting comment spam. With no action on my part, that is. I’m still scratching my head.
Since I close commenting on posts after 7 days, I save my archives from being spammed into oblivion, but even then, I was at one point having trouble with posts no more than a day or two old. The last two months have been quiet, though, so I’ll just keep my fingers crossed and hope my luck continues.
My referral logs, unfortunately, are another story.
That is pretty cool that the spammers just stopped targetting you! After installing Referrer Karma, I’ve really gotten a better idea of just how often evil bots crawl this page. You may want to try it, as it works for MT and is pretty good at what it does. It’s color coded so you can easily check to see if someone is mistakenly blacklisted (the URL usually gives it away pretty quickly…).
I like to keep my old comments open since licensing is so far behind fansubs in general, but yeah the older posts are almost always the first ones spammed. Spam Karma actually bumps up its security level on older posts =).
Well, maybe in order not to mess with a judge or lawyer the spammers scan the blogs or possibly just the URL for “law” nowadays and skip it then. Try seaslugjury and see whether it helps.
So you mean a URL like… http://www.seasluglawsuit.com perhaps?