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Newbie/Basic Questions

What about the other methods of spamming?

Author: D.Collin2 (16 Jan 05 5:12pm)

E-Mail spam is not the only technique of spammers. There is also referer spam, comments spam, and other ones.

A few days before i joined this project, i set up a script to disable those robots.

For people interested into it, the script is described here (but in french)

http://www.thanerd.net/index.php/2005/01/16/p50
but you could use altavista-translation url:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thanerd.net%2Findex.php%2F2005%2F01%2F16%2Fp50&lp=fr_en

Re: What about the other methods of spamming?

Author: M.Prince (16 Jan 05 5:23pm)

We're definitely thinking of ways to track and protect our users from other forms of spam. The next version of the honey pot script will likely include some mechanism to track robots that are posting "comment spam" to sites. Our hope is that we can protect bloggers who are being absolutely innundated by the garbage recently.

We'll definitely check out your approach (although my French is very rusty... AV's bablefish is GREAT). If you have any suggestions on how we can use our large network to help distribute the information about comment spammers, referer spammers, etc... please don't hesitate to send them our way and we'll see if we can build them in.

Thanks for the feedback!

Re: What about the other methods of spamming?

Author: D.Collin2 (22 Jan 05 6:57am)

Well, i think some kind of database will do... It would store referer regex in a "sort by date" fashion, so that end-users might have a script query the database and retrieve "spammers since x date", compressed if possible, and a client-side script (on end-user's server) would add the lines in a .htAccess (or like i do, in some other .htXXX file).

Actually, i have another article that discusses more about referer-spam. The previous one is more about denying access to website to robots that do not respect robots.txt rules...

See this approach for referer-spamming fight:
http://www.thanerd.net/index.php/2005/01/08/p37

There is also the approach that Google, Yahoo and MSN adopted, the rel="nofollow", but i'm not really into it. I don't really like that one. I discuss it here:
http://www.thanerd.net/index.php/2005/01/20/p59