Three Sticks — Moses on Life

Three Sticks has been inundated lately with comment and trackback spam. I conservatively estimate that I have to review and delete 300 - 500 trackback and comment spams per day. Obviously this is getting old. Since I tend to just scan through the comment / trackback moderation cue, it is possible that I have deleted legitimate comments / trackbacks. If I have, I apologize. I am taking steps to address this problem.

I’ve been using the AntiLeech tool to stop sploggers. This has been fairly successful. There are still a few sites that are stealing some of my content.

This morning I installed Bad Behavior which in it’s default setting seems to block approximately 30 - 50% of the spam I was receiveing earlier. This is a good start. I will also include Trackback Validator (a research project at Rice University) this evening to see if I can further reduce the spam load. Trackback Validator has an option for you to automatically transmit your spam logs Rice for further research. I really like the idea of supporting a university project. However if it doesn’t prove sufficient, I may also try Akismet. It’s free for personal use (ex. your site makes less that $5/per month).

The spam problem is really upsetting, because the most popular links in my logs are the trackback links. I may have to turn off the links after a set periods as I suggested earlier. I really don’t want to do that for 2 reasons:

1. I’m still building up traffic to the site
2. I want to site to be as open as possible and to help other bloggers build their own traffic by linking to Three Sticks.

However, if I am unable to remedy the situation I will close off comments and trackbacks after a set time probably between 14 - 30 days.

Update 4/2/2007

I went ahead and installed Comment Timeout to closeout comments, trackback and pings after a 45 days or 90 days after the last trackback, comment or ping is sent to the article, which ever is later.

I also added code to my .htaccess file to block TrackBack/1.02 which seems to be a bad bot that infects other computers enabling them to perform a limited denial of service attack on a website or blog.

To block the TrackBack/1.02 user agent I added the following to the bottom of my .htaccess file. I caution that if you are weary about editing you .htaccess file then you should use the established plugins above rather than attempting to edit the file. You can disable your blog by incorrectly editing you .htaccess file.

My Additions to My .htaccess file

# BEGIN SPAMMER

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^TrackBack/*” spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^lwp-trivial/*” spammer=yes

Order allow, deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer

# END SPAMMER

I got the idea from MacMerc.com.

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