Clever spamf¤#&/

jplindstrom on 2003-06-10T21:57:12

Keeping mailing lists spam free is really annoying and requires a substantial effort nowadays.

At Yahoo Groups, not only is it a common occurrence for a new random-letter Yahoo account to subscribe and fire off a few messages, today a newly subcsribed account uploaded spam files to the file area. WTF!?!

On one list I moderate all new members' messages and flag them as non-moderated if they aren't Yahoo addresses, another list is set up so I need to approve all subscriptions.

It's all so tiresome... *sigh* give it a rest already!

---

Next bastion - use.perl

Matts on 2003-06-11T08:05:45

I'm waiting until the spammers discover the forums like slashdot and use.perl.

I suspect they may already have done slashdot, but I don't read the comments very often, and when I do it's at +2.

I wonder if there's some mileage to running bayesian filters in slash...

Re:Next bastion - use.perl

Dom2 on 2003-06-11T08:54:28

The trouble with that idea is that you might end up promoting the consistent trolls.

Mind you, if you took the human moderation of comments into consideration as well, you might do better.

-Dom

Re:Next bastion - use.perl

jplindstrom on 2003-06-11T14:59:19

Well, they obviously already discovered the link-back/track-back or whatever it's called that links back to referring sites on some blogs.

Hit a blog with a HTTP_REFERER to your site and--voila, an incoming link promoting your site in some search engines.

That should be extremely easy to abuse in an automated fashion.

Re:Next bastion - use.perl

jmason on 2003-06-17T02:29:45

Yeah, I found a few "google spammers" doing just that to my weblog. (Really, I'm not just pimping my weblog ;) The writeup on it is at http://taint.org/2003/04/04/224840a.html .