pf » Tag: spam on Pete Freitag's Blog

Fighting comment spam seams like a never ending battle. I've done a lot over the last few years to try and squash it on my blog.

I started out by implementing a list of words that would trigger the comment to be blocked.

I am happy to announce the latest creation from foundeo: fusionKit.

fusionKit is a CD full of some handy ColdFusion components and UDF's. It is a similar concept to the DRK's that Macromedia used to sell, but is it's 100% ColdFusion.

I haven't been monitoring my trackbacks for a while, and when I checked them this morning I found a ton of spam. After I was finished deleting around 700 trackbacks (not by hand, I ran queries with spam words).

I found that over 90% of all the trackbacks that I've had on my blog are spam.

Those of you that know me personally know that I'm a pretty laid back kind of guy. There are a few things that really annoy me - traffic, and junk mail.

Google has no doubt not suprised anyone with their new Blog Search BETA.

What is suprising is the search result quality. I was hoping the Google would use their immense trust of brain power to come up with a blog search that produces good accurate and relavent results. But they didn't.

We recently did some analysis on our bayesian spam filter corpus (spam assassin token database), and came up with a list of words with a high spam/ham ratio.

By using the spam/ham ratio, and not the spam count, we came up with a better list of words to avoid.

You would think that by having custom written blogging software (only two other blogs out there are using this code), and not allowing HTML in comments, that comment spammers would not waste their time on me. But they do.

I just got some spam emails within the last few days that contained ASCII Art messages. This is clever, and they did make it past spam assasin. The last one I got received a spam assasin score of 3.0, a 5.0 is required to classify a message as spam on our server.

ReturnPath has announced that they are aquiring BondedSender from IronPort Systems.

BondedSender is a dns whitelist that companies must pay a bond ($$), and go through a TRUSTe privacy certification in order to get listed on.

When I implemented the new trackback feature on my blog, I was aware that spammers like to use trackbacks, so I coded in a keyword blacklist. Roger Benningfield added a comment about track back autodiscovery and spamming that got me thinking.

Most people know that spammers have robots that surf the net looking for email addresses, such programs are called email harvesters.

I get a lot of hits from HTTP Referer spammers in my logs these days. If your not familiar with this type of spam, its pretty simple. Someone has a url that they want you to visit, so they write a spider to visit your site, but they put in their url as the HTTP referer.