February 02, 2005
On trackbacks and spam
We saw it coming a long time ago; if comments were getting spammed by people trying to boost their PageRank, then trackbacks couldn't be far behind. The bayesian spam filter also handles trackbacks, even though there really hadn't been any trackback spam yet.
Well, the spammers just discovered trackback spam a few days ago. The bayesian filter (which I left in place though I turned off comment filtering since BotBlock was working so well) caught all of it, afaict. Unfortunately, this part of the filter must not have been well-tested, because the part that actually deletes the spam is broken. So the six hundred or so trackbacks aren't visible, but I can't delete them for a while.
And MT doesn't seem to allow turning off trackbacks as a whole; you can just turn them off on a per-entry basis, and change the default for new entries. So the spam is slowly accumulating. Maybe now would be a good time to upgrade to the new version of MT....
"To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." --Martin Luther King, Jr.
Posted by blahedo at 12:30pm on 2 Feb 2005