Blog spamming
Gosh. That was quick -- despite the long chronology you can see to the left, Fading Memories the blog isn't really all that old. A few weeks. The backlog came from my other Fading Memories site, the Zope site. It happened now and then that someone tried to add spam comments, but I had moderation turned on, and nothing slithered past my watchful eye.
No such luck with Blosxom. I haven't found a way to make writebacks moderated, and I like the occasional comment as much as the next person, and I prefer doing updates as writebacks myself. So I don't want to remove the writeback plugin. But today I found three writeback spams clinging to my Oliver Twist translation rant...
Now I know that Google has been spidering this website like there's no tomorrow, as has MSN and some others (including a little something that indexes the web to prevent student plagiarism), but still, spammed in under three weeks. Not as fast as the first attempt to root my machine, that happened five minutes after I had managed to get the cable modem working with Linux in 1998 or thereabouts, but still, pretty fast.
And the texts were so innocuous, too -- 'nice site', and 'I agree with what you said' -- I wouldn't have been alerted if the names given hadn't been so unbelievable, and if the third text hadn't been as irrelevant to Dickens as Augustine is to Eastern Orthodox theology.
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