Comment spam pointing nowhere December 27th

Spam Probably, I should’ve just shut up when I stated that poocs.net hasn’t been hit hard by comment spam. When I woke up this morning there were 90 comments pending moderation (thank god they were not live!).

A new form of comment spam seems to have crept up though, we’re not talking about PageRank whoring, not spam in the traditional/email-like sense, not even real words! All 90+ comments consisted of a non-existing/non-resolving linked with a random bunch of characters and followed by another bunch of random characters and a literal period:

feiirok xawwocqwwet.

Hello? I mean, what is this garbage going to get them besides a handful blog authors either switching to using Typekey or switching off commenting alltogether (both being quite unfortunate)?

I’ve been trying to come up with a regexp for MT-Blacklist to tighten the rules a bit but I’ve been unsuccessful using the ‘beginning of string’-anchor (`^{`) or ‘end of string’-anchor (`$`) despite reading Jay Allen’s Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist. I ended up using:}

\\w+\ \w+.

.. but that’s certainly going to block some false positives while keeping my inbox clean of comments to moderate for the moment. However, with `` and `$` added (given that they work) this should be blocking all of this nonsense.

Any hints?

plugin to force comment previews as another measure to lower comment spam.]

Filed Under: poocs.net Web

habi 12.27.04 / 09AM

i’ve been getting flooded with that kind of spam. (more than 300 comments spammed in the last 20 hours). it seems uber-hard to come up with something to arm MTBlacklist with to end that kind of spam. let me know if you find something that helps, and i’ll do it too…
scoop 12.27.04 / 09AM

The blacklist item I added blocked another 120 or so attempts of comment spam thus far, so it does work to an extend, as outlined above. Still, it’s not ideal so I’m looking into forced comment previews and captchas now (which I’d love to avoid btw.).
jasun 12.29.04 / 01AM

I’m getting his with this as well.

One pattern to note is that every one I get has a number or 2 at the end of the name and also email.

So a regexp for this should do the trick?

The only other option I am having is blocking each IP as it is used. I’ve got quite a list now, I’ll probably post it up since it might be of use for people in the same situation, running MT v1.x & MT-BL v1.x
scoop 12.30.04 / 11AM

72 hours have passed and we’re at 500 blocked attempts without a single false positive. Yay!

I dropped the captcha idea for now, since the available solutions are both not pretty and bothersome to install.

poocs.net

Comment spam pointing nowhere December 27th

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