Spam

Interesting. Just got a notification that an Uncabled user named “nareman” — who used killerspm@runbox.com as an email address — was created two days ago and just recently posted to very automated-looking spam comments to the blog.

Normally I’d brush this off a little, but the whole thing feels like someone’s testing out a spambot that will handle email account verifications. Perhaps there’s already been one, and this is just my own first encounter.

Whatever the answer is, it helped remind me that I need to go back and check if the CAPTCHA module for Drupal was finally updated for 5.0. (Just checked and it has been. Updating soon.) I hope that the ability to login using credentials from other Drupal-powered sites will make the account requirement on this site a little easier to swallow, but then again, it may just be another attack vector down the road where spammers will set up their own Drupal sites, register their spambots, and auto-login that way.

Sigh. The battle continues….

Trackback has been turned off once again — all it did was collect spam. Drupal’s spam.module valiantly tried to fight it off but it was like chasing your tail (well, not your tail) where the filter would only be trained on the old items and miss a handful of new ones. Wasn’t worth the headache. I’d love if a system that was directly blogger-to-blogger (like Trackback) worked but clearly it doesn’t, not when spam blogs are so numerous and easy to implement.

[Edited 2006-10-04] Unfortunately, Drupal’s cron was refusing to complete when I turned trackback.module off, so it’s back on until I can find and resolve the problem. sigh.