I followed a Doc Searls link this morning to a promising blog, “Hello Fan, Here Comes the Sh*t,” that identifies blog spammers from domain registration info and discusses tactics for taking them down. I used to do this with email back in my pre-blogging days; maybe this is a better way to fight fire with fire.
Regarding my own spam problems: I mercifully escaped another round of comment spam this weekend—maybe this is because of my own public anti-comment-spam arms race—but I do seem to keep finding trackback spam. As I noted a while ago, there are very few good ways to find trackback spam reliably on Manila since there is no notification process. What I’ve taken to doing is loading all my news item category pages and searching for any unusual trackback activity. I found a few more nests of spam pings but unfortunately will have to repeat the process periodically to root them out.
One thing that cheered me up: either the trackback spam ping tool that this last person was using is broken or the person who was using it was an idiot. I found lots of spam pings that didn’t preface the trackback URL with http://
, meaning that when you clicked on it you got a useless 404 page deep in my site. Heh.