Mike Borozdin's Blog

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Spammers Hit Trackbacks

It’s really sad, but true. Spammers hit trackbacks. Recently, you could prevent spam in comments by enforcing registration or adding a CAPTCHA or by simply enabling comment moderation. Now it’s getting harder and harder. Spammers post trackbacks links that lead people to their scummy web sites, most of them are porn web sites. In fact, I don’t think they are going to attract visitors to their web sites in this way, instead they are trying to increase their PageRank, I thinkl.

I’ve been blogging for about a half of a year. Everybody can comment on my posts, however comments have to be approved by me first, but I have never forced people to register or pass a CAPTCHA and I don’t remember receiving any spam posts until the recent times, when some Busby SEO Test started posting comments. I must admit it was a pretty clever bot, but it still generated scum comments.

Anyway, the amount of spam was pretty tolerable besides it has never gone approved. But everything changes. In the past two days, I’ve been getting spam posts disguised as trackbacks that is really nasty, because trackbacks don’t need to be approved, they become visible to visitors after they get posted.

It’s really unpleasant that such a useful service as the trackback can get a bad reputation because of the spam abuse.

After Googling for a while, I found out that this problem isn’t a new one, I came across the mentions of it that dated back to 2005, this basically means that I just didn’t face it, because I wasn’t a blogger.

So, it’s crucial to prevent trackback spamming, I wonder if anybody knows a good solutions that works with BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5. It’s also interesting to know who anyone fights with the trackback spam.


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Posted by Mike Borozdin on Sunday, December 28, 2008 5:52 AM GMT
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DotNetKicks.com

Sunday, December 28, 2008 3:46 AM GMT

trackback

Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

Spammers Hit Trackbacks

Dating blog United States

Thursday, January 01, 2009 4:48 PM GMT

Dating blog

This is useful info. I have a blogengine.net blog. I too don't know about a solution. I get spam once in a while. The beauty is that blogengine sends me an email any time someone posts a comment. If I notice something fishy - like their comment has nothing to do with the subject of my blog, I delete the comment. As far as track backs, I am not sure what that is. Can you kind of explain exactly what that is?

Mike Borozdin

Sunday, January 18, 2009 5:37 AM GMT

Mike Borozdin

Hello,

Sorry for such a late reply. Trackbacks are automatically sent comments via a special protocol that let you know that someone put a link to your post. For instance, if blogger Jim writes an interesting story, then his friend Bob decides to write a post about Jim's story and he puts a link to Jim's story, then Jim will automatically receive a trackback comment for his story, so he will known that somebody linked to his story.

Trackbacks automatically go approved that makes them a nice target for spammers.

You can read more here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback

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