Comment spammers chewing blogger bandwidth like crazy

Tue Jan 16 03:06:15 UTC 2007

On 1/14/07, Gadi Evron <ge at linuxbox.org> wrote:
> Your assumption is incorrect. These DNSBLs cover spam sent in email,
> indeed. Thing is, spam is spam and spammers are spammers. Meaning, they
> spam in every way they can.

How does this make his assumption incorrect?  Spam is spam and DNSBLs
will likely be very effective when it comes to stopping comment spam.
There are, of course, some severe problems with using a DNSBL as a
blocklist for comments...

> I've been working on a new DNSBL for comment/etc. spam for a while, which
> will be reliable, generally, it doesn't exist yet for public consumption.

But there's a major problem here...  A DNSBL is a source blocklist.
Since the current trend in spam (comment and smtp) is to use botnets,
then by blocking the bots, you also block the users who would make
meaningful comments.

The argument there is that those users don't deserve to comment if
they can't keep their computers clean, but let's get real..  Some of
this stuff is getting pretty advanced and it's getting tougher for
general users to keep their computers clean.

I think a far better system is something along the lines of a SURBL
with word filtering.  I believe that Akismet does something along
these lines.

> There is such a black listing service already, but again, reliability is
> an issue.

Reliability is always an issue with blacklists as they are run as
independent entities.  There is always someone who has a problem with
how an individual blacklist is run...

>         Gadi.

-- 
Jason 'XenoPhage' Frisvold
XenoPhage0 at gmail.com
http://blog.godshell.com