Boiling Spam

Spam just makes my blood boil. I’d mentioned this on the OPML blog, but I’ve started to get spam on Uncabled, even though I’ve enabled CAPTCHAs!

It’s incredible the amount of effort spammers go through to get their crap on other people’s sites, but the economy of it makes it worth it. It must be so mind-bloggingly cheap to produce spam that the few moments when this kind of research needs to be paid for they are perfectly willing to do so.

Needless to say, after this weekend of configuring all my Drupal sites to run from a shared installation — making the process of keeping the sites up to date on patches and what-not a whole lot easier — I reinstalled the spam.module. This module is a godsend, and so good that I decided to reinstall the trackback.module now that it hooks into the spam detection. Immediately upon reinstalling it on teradome.com, the filter caught roughly a dozen trackback spams. Good god. I remember reading something that said a machine running Windows 95 will have a security-breach attempt run on it within 5 minutes of connecting it to the internet. Now I believe it.

So now I’m running spam filters and CAPTCHAs? Sadly, yes. You know, if Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wants to blame the slowness of the internet on anything, maybe he should start with the spammers.