Confederacy of a Dunce - Spammy, spammy, spammy

Friday, September 16, 2005

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A curious thing has been happening in the world of spam and its intersection with my blog. I've gone through the standard blog growing pains of dealing with comment spam a while ago (also trackback spam, but this has been only a very minor problem thanks to the dasblog upgrade). For those few who don't know, comment spam is when someone places an advertising comment on a blog (intending to have it displayed to other readers who read the comments and possibly follow their links, also possibly trying to gain better listings from search engines). I suddenly started getting a lot of comment spam, which was easily stopped by requiring commenters to recognize and type in distorted letters (captcha) in order to make a comment. Only one spammer has made it through to leave comment spam since then (related to construction services in Philadelphia, and entered [by hand I assume] on this comment which I suppose is loosely related).

The real problem (and it's only a problem behind the scenes) is referral spam. As is the case for most blogs, mine keeps details of who is visiting my site (what links they clicked to get here, what sort of browser they are using, when comments were added, etc.). Referral spam abuses this system, making it look like visitors have come to a blog from a commercial site (at least for my site, almost entirely related to poker and/or diet pills, the names of which I have intentionally included in this post without munging them in order to see whether this post attracts undue attention). Some blogs (like this one for example [it hasn't been updated in a while, and has various other problems to boot]) display an automatically-generated list of the top referrers, which is probably why this sort of referral spam has caught on (I doubt Mr. Max [former contestant on the UK version of the reality TV program "The Apprentice" {Alan Sugar instead of Donald Trump?!?}] is actually getting loads of referrals related to phentermine, norwegion cruises [sic], ringtone, cheap calls, cialis, jackpots, virtual slots, etc.). But on my blog, referrals are not displayed anywhere but to me (when I look at the logs). In fact, the updated version of dasBlog goes some ways to prevent referral spam. But my logs remain full of blocked referrals (something like 30 today so far, nearly all blocked because of texas-holdem, free-online-poker and the like, although once in a while a referral spam will make it past the block. But it doesn't matter because I don't display referrers anywhere). Like buses they come all at once: a single spam site "refers" to one of my entries, then quick as a wink they troll through various other entries with their false referrals (I really appreciate real referrals, by the way, like this one). But it seems like almost always the same entry is the one they start with: Cowes to Lymington and back again. How and why they started with this entry, I have no idea. Other entries of mine are far more popular in gaining visitors who get here through search engines. This is my only entry about sailing (unless I mentioned the 1980 Olympics in one of my Tallinn posts), perhaps spammers are looking for sailors? Perhaps I'll write an entry about boxers and see whether spammers are following the lead of Nina Hamnett.