Block 'wrote an interesting post today' spam
I'm sick and tired of a new kind of blog spam that is appearing on the Internet in general and on my site in particular. So called auto-blogs, that is blogs that are running an automated script adding content to their website without user interaction, are pinging the blogs that they rip off like crazy for a reason.
Most of those auto-blogs copy the first paragraph of a story and send a ping to the blog that they copied the paragraph from. This is done automatically because a link to the blog in question is placed on the auto-blog as well. Those pingbacks appear in the comments of many blogs in the last weeks and I decided it is time to stop this once and for all.
They usually begin with 'xxx wrote an interesting post today' where xxx is a random first name. As soon as I see this I know it is spam. I used to verify this in the beginning by visiting the site of the pingback only to see that it had thousands of similar posts from a lot of websites.
Another indicator is that those sites usually have thousands or more posts already. Many of those auto-blogs show their post count in the title of the story. If it is starting with ?p=xxxxx you can be fairly sure that it is a auto-blog if p is larger than a few thousand entries.
Stopping that spam is actually rather uncomplicated. I do use Spam Karma which has a nice blacklist feature. I can add a domain name to be blacklisted from my website with no problem.
All I need to do is select Domain Blacklist and enter the domain name without http://www.
The effect is of course that a Pingback from such a domain is getting a bad score in Spam Karma which means that this entry is going right into the spam folder.
Update: You can blacklist domains directly in WordPress as well if you prefer that. To do so open Settings > Discussion and add any domain name you want to block to the comment blacklist setting there.
you could always use those nifty ‘captcha’ codes. most bots can figure them out.
can’t*
lol
I also tend to monitor every comment posted… Only 100% safe way really…
Captchas do not work when another site sends a pingback. That’s automatic.
Why not just have it send all posts that include “an interesting post today” to the moderation filter. I don’t think many people will be saying that in their comments. That’s what I do, and it’s extremely effective.
If a particular site bugs me too much, I just access one of the bot farm command newsgroups and have the bots ping the arsehole to death. I love these bot hackers. They leave their bots open for all to use :)
I have such a small time blog, and yet I get them as well…