I’ve had a little spate of blog spam recently (for those that don’t know what this is, imagine the spam you get in your mailbox for adult products, but posted as a comment on a blog entry). I can’t tell if the choice of entry is random, or whether they are picking on specific keywords – they are all older entries though.

I have MovableType set to email me whenever a comment is posted, so removing them so far has not been a major problem (along with banning the IP address they originated from, though that is almost not worth it since they are most often dynamically assigned, and these people jump from ISP to ISP anyway).

Instead, I chose to search out some countermeasures. The goal was to make sure that anybody posting a comment did not have to suffer, but any bots out there scanning for comment posting links would be confused. I found a lot of good information for MovableType users at Yoz Grahame’s blog, and also a reference there to this entry at Burningburd both of which provided some useful suggestions for simple countermeasures. More robust techniques are probably needed for the scum who are posting this stuff manually.

For those interested, here’s the hall of shame to date (i.e. the domains where the postings came from):