Naughty Spam Day

It’s Wednesday, and for the last 4 of 5 weeks, perhaps longer, that’s porn spam day. It doesn’t show up on my site, but my Blacklist log shows the comment and ping denials. I get a few email notifications telling me that some made it into moderation (until I installed MT-Moderate for Trackbacks, some pings showed up on the site).

The porn spammers mainly send pings, although I think I have seen a few log entries for blocked comments too. The loan and finance spammers seem to like sending comment spam on Mondays. The gambling spammers try with comments almost every day. The loan, finance and gambling spams seem to come from the same source, if I am drawing the right inferences from data in the email address fields in the forms. They stick to comments, although I have seen some pings from them too.
All of them are constantly coming up with new domain names to avoid blacklist entries based on their site and domain names, and they have diversified. I had a couple of thousand strings in my blacklist and most of them were parts of site and domain names – and most of them haven’t had a hit since I installed MTB. The spammers just move on. The porn spiders used to have a new domain every week, and now they use several. Sometimes the site names are randomly generated. They also seem to have figured out how URL Patterns and other link-sensitive Regexes work. That’s too bad because I had some patterns that blocked hundreds of comments and pings.
I have been building a list of phrases – usually not single words – that I don’t expect to see in real comments and trackbacks to real blogs. I blacklist those phrases as text strings. MT-Blacklist Strings are processed fast, so they are easy on the server. I have been adding a few logical strings each week, based on submissions that get past the blacklist. It’s a little game.
So don’t send me comments with the words or phrases “mature tits”, “gay cock”, “twinks”, “beastiality” (sic), “poker”, “texas holdem”, “hentai”, “paris hilton nude” or “payday loans” or trackback to one of my posts if you say things like that in your entry.