Random Developments

On the one hand, I love MT-Blacklist. Yesterday alone, it blocked 136 trackback spams and 39 comment spams to my blog. Most of them were for some type of, and I’m almost afraid to use this expression, online casino. Others were for various types of quasi-legal pharmaceutical drugs (the drugs are legal; the sellers, not so much). I used to have MT-scode generating a CAPTCHA challenge for comment posters, but it stopped working thanks to something my hosting provider did, so I had to switch (and it doesn’t protect trackbacks, anyway).

On the other hand, though, I hate these guys. It’s annoying. It’s like talking against a background of white noise that gets louder and louder. It’s worse than e-mail spam, in a way, because, if it stays online (and you bet that it does, in many abandoned or not actively watched blogs) the spam “hits” many people with just one placement. For e-mail spam, it either hits the owner of the mailbox, or it doesn’t hit anyone; blog spam is closer to newsgroup spam, I think, except that almost no one reads newsgroups anymore.

My mailboxes have been reasonably clean of spam for a while now, thanks to some very good implementations of bayesian filtering. I understand that there are bayes-based comment spam filters around, but last time I checked they weren’t very usable. Maybe it’s time to either check again or to start working in one…