The trackback spammers here have been been getting more persistent, and, of course, sneakier. I still get all the typical pharmaceutical ones (though even those are getting more varied), but I’m also getting a lot more with random text blocks for everything other than the link itself (and the site names isn’t anything immediately, obviously evil, and aren’t immediately blacklisted).
I now actually watch all the TB messages that come up, and am hopping on things relatively fast. I still don’t want to disable the facility, since I extensively make use of it for my own internal cross-referencing (and enjoy the occasional legit TB from someone), but I may have to move it all to moderation. Bleah.
I’m also going to expand the blacklist resources that MT’s SpamLookup uses. This article suggests a few. Ah, and this MT article notes that one of the default blacklisters MT was using is no longer available (which was probably slowing down comment and trackback posting) and suggests an alternative (though that seems problematic, and it’s important, for performance reasons, not to overdo the blacklist lookups).
We’ll see how that works.
I now have to require manual verification for a trackback. I hundreds of pharma trackback spam hits a day. The sad thing is that legitmate trackbacks sometime get lost in the flush.
Why these jerks do this. I’m guessing they somehow either make money or think they will make money doing it, but I fail to see how it works. Somewhere somehow it would have to turn into a legitimate sale of pharmaceuticals. So why are drug companies allowing their product to be sold over the web? Seems like it should be illegal.
I often have dozens that show up as Junk — and since I use the AutoBan plug-in, that may be blocking many dozens more (AutoBan modifies .htaccess to block IP addresses of stuff that gets Junked for a day or two; that’s a lot less system-intensive way to block stuff).
The companies paying for this are, so far as I can tell, fly-by-night Internet pharmacies and private firms, not any big names. And the spammers are hoping for link goodness, to get their advertisers to pay more money (“See! Because of our efforts, eleven zillion people now are linking back to your site, and if someone is looking for [insert drug here] on Google, it will show up first! Now pay us!”).
I just hope they all suffer from long, painful bouts of diarrhea, and know that it’s their karmic punishment …