I seem to have thwarted the spammers with my extra comment requirements. However, they have found another backdoor: trackbacks. I don’t know what they are but the spammers have used trackbacks as a way to post comments without visiting (or posting to) the comment page.

Today I added some extra protection to the trackback feature of my weblog and so far it seems to have stemmed the flow.

If I ever find Mr. Texas Holdem or Mr. Online Poker he is in for some serious ass-kicking. And a big stinky beer fart.

There’s a part of me that feels that all this is for the good: I need to maintain a secure site and the spammers are simply exposing vulnerabilities. Another part is angry at the principle of the whole thing: I maintain this weblog and as a public service offer the ability for anyone to submit a comment. I don’t want to censor anyone’s comments as I know I can’t grow unless prodded by another viewpoint. The spammers are ruining this functionality for everyone: if I can’t figure out how to stop them, I will have to remove comments altogether and that would be a very sad day indeed. I don’t like having to moderate comments since that discourages an open discussion. Another part of me is annoyed at my blogging software for allowing such easy spammage. While I can’t criticize too much since it’s open source software and I didn’t pay anything for it, at the same time I’m not making money off of it and I’m paying money to have this site hosted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 02:09 and is filed under General, Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.