Posts tagged: SPAM

Like every other web site/service/app/community/thingy that allows individual user contributions, there’s spam on Delicious too. The perp I came across today was “mcloan” – check the page out for yourself – and there are many more. Fred Stutzman has a good post on the subject, and I came across an exchange with naive Delicious spammers on Brian Dear’s weblog from last year.

But what’s Delicious/Yahoo doing about this? Where’s the Craigslist-style “flag this user as a spammer” button?

In the past 24 hours I’ve seen a wave of comment spam resembling the late August outage. Mostly porn spam. Is it just me? I’m using the Akismet API from my homebrew code (negatives are simply rejected), but maybe this is a sign that I should start using the feedback part of their API to report false negatives.

This also gets me thinking about the need for an Akismet-like service that is run cooperatively, with multiple servers to avoid the single-point-of-failure problem. (And maybe more liberal licensing.) I think Akismet is cool; it’s just impossible not to think about The Next Cool Thing once the Current Thing starts giving you trouble.

This actually happened two months ago.

I learned of my achievement via a mail administrator wondering why thousands of pieces of mail (spam, it so happened) getting forwarded to my GMail account were bouncing back. The bounce messages didn’t say “mailbox full” or “user exceeded quota” or anything like that, so even I didn’t know what was going on at first.

So, there’s a bit of a stink brewing about Comcast’s SMTP blacklist. Once again, Comcast decided to block mail forwarded from the Well to Comcast addresses, and they have been raising similar havoc elsewhere. Nothing gets people pissed off like messing with their email.

It’s possible that Comcast’s admins are well-intentioned, but it’s also possible that this is part of a business strategy to push people from small ISPs (who sporadically get blocked by Comcast) to Comcast itself (which happens never to get blocked by Comcast).

I’ve yanked out my own crude anti-comment-spam tests and replaced them with a nice tidy call to the Akismet API. If this works out I’ll most certainly incorporate it into the Django version of the blog – there’s a nice Python interface as well.

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seanrox commented on Thu Aug 24 14:58:33 2006:

Akismet is nice and works wonders on comment spam as you’ll see on your site.

The guys over at automattic.com really know their stuff.