tech.agilitynerd spam

I was getting hit by comment spammers in the last week who were using URL-encoding of their addresses to get around the comment blacklisting filter I use. By replacing regular characters with the multi-character encoded representation of those characters within the URL the spammers were able to post comment spam …

I came up with two improvements to the first release of my refererblock plugin:

• If the referer string matches the site's URL it passed immediately and isn't checked against the blacklist.
• The blacklist.txt file was being read even if the referer string was empty. Now it is only read …

Over the past year I'd noticed that comment and trackback spammers had been hitting the same dozen or so pages of my blog multiple times daily. (It is probably the same person/group who took a snapshot of the articles on my front page at that time and just reuses …

Like so many other bloggers who allow comments on their websites and blog articles, I was facing increasing comment spam as my blog got noticed by more spammers. The size of this problem is illustrated by this Google query for "comment spam" that returned 1.5 million hits. For the …