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 think.

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.

Mike Borozdin (Twitter)
28 December 2008

The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. My personal thoughts tend to change, hence the articles in this blog might not provide an accurate reflection of my present standpoint.

© Mike Borozdin