spam trackbacks

[qureus]

Hi John,

I know you've addressed this question in this forum but I'm not finding the track and would appreciate a revisit.

I'm getting spammed at Intuiosity by a couple of websites ("online poker" and "texas hold em") and want to know if I can block them so they can't post back to my articles. These two sites are doing daily spams to my blog.

I can't find their IP in my Dashboard info, though. When I click on their link in the trackback stats, it goes to a "page not found."

Can you give tips on dealing with trackback spammers, please, and what we can do to combat them?

Thanks,
Qureus

[qureus]

It's still early and I just really looked at the posted thread before mine. Guess the question is, is trackback spam the same as or different than referer spam?

Q

[john]

Trackback spam is not exactly the same thing as referer spam. Trackbacks can appear on your blog itself, not just on the site stats like referers, so it is something we are concerned about. We do have the capability to do mass deletions for these types of spams and to block the originating IPs, both of which we are employing as I am sure you have noticed.

[qureus]

So when I'm clicking on the spam link (like texas hold em) within my blog admin and don't get to their page, is that the result of BlogHarbor's deletions?

Is there a way to avoid having them come in at all? Or is the problem one of a constanting changing IP address for the spammers?

Errrrrr! It really bugs me the way spammers take advantage of other people's hard work.

Keep up your good work, though!

Q

[john]

So when I'm clicking on the spam link (like texas hold em) within my blog admin and don't get to their page, is that the result of BlogHarbor's deletions?

The reason you don't get to their page is due to the fact that the website has been suspended by the ISP who hosts that site. The ISP likely suspended the account for abuse based on complaints about that trackback spam.

Is there a way to avoid having them come in at all? Or is the problem one of a constanting changing IP address for the spammers?

At this time, there are some methods we can and have implemented at the system level to block them such as IP-based filtering. But since as you point out these spammers are constantly changing IP addresses, it's tough to proactively ban IPs. We are doing some 'after the fact' monitoring so that trackback spam that comes in gets deleted and associated IPs banned.

Errrrrr! It really bugs me the way spammers take advantage of other people's hard work.

Tell me about it...

Keep up your good work, though!

Thanks, you too. And thanks for your patience and understanding as we try to come up with solutions to combat these !@#$ spammers.

[PorqueChop]

I'm having problems with this as well: texas holdem, on-line poker, and phentermine are driving me to the brink.

I've disabled trackbacks in my new posts via the post defaults, and as the trackbacks for old articles show up on my main page I delete them and disable trackbacks for those individual articles. I figure that eventually I will have trackbacks disabled in all of my articles.

Is there a way to disable trackbacks for old articles without going into each article individually?

Other than I hate the spammers and I don't want their stupid useless links on my blog, is there any real benefit to getting rid of the trackbacks?

Thanks to John and anyone else with input.

[john]

There's no reason at all to let these trackback spammers bother you, much less drive you to the brink.

We're doing a purge of these spams each business day, so there's no need to turn off trackbacks for new or old articles. Additionally, we're developing some systems that will prevent these from arriving in the first place.

Is there any real benefit to getting rid of the trackbacks?

To put it the other way, there's no harm whatsoever done to your blog if you don't do anything.

[artatcomo]

About two weeks ago, I also started getting lots of referral spam. The joy of looking at my referral stats is gone. The first couple pages (dozens of sites) are spammer referrals. The first ranking addresses are hitting me twenty or thirty times. My question is, what is their motive or pay back. I also wonder about John's statment about no harm being done. My search engine hit stats exploded about the same time as the spammer referrals. My bandwidth growth will soon exceed my limit. Could it be that the spammers are using search engine hits to find addresses to spam. If their bots are hitting our site repetitively, could this slow or deny others from loading our sites?
http://art.blogx.com/

[john]

My question is, what is their motive or pay back.

I'll quote myself from this post:

Some blog systems used to display a dynamically updated list of Recent Referers on their home page, so spammers would send forged web page requests to a popular blog in order for a link to the spammer's site to appear on the blog. The theory was that the outgoing link would increase the ranking in Google for the spammers site, not to mention get a few clicks from the curious.

Since our system does not generate a list of Recent Referers for display on your blog, the spammers don't get much benefit from the practice, and all we as bloggers end up with is decreased utility of our Site Stats...

I also wonder about John's statment about no harm being done.

That reply was in reference to Trackback spam and is indeed correct. You are speaking of referer spam, which is not the same thing.

As I noted in this post with respect to referer spam:

Referer spam actually uses less bandwidth than a legitimate page request by a real user since the "robot" which sends the fake request for your web page never downloads images, javascript, css, etc. It just sends a forged request for an HTML document so this has a lot less impact on your site's bandwidth consumption than a legitimate page request which would also download the images and so on along with the HTML document.

My bandwidth growth will soon exceed my limit.

We're not actually your blog hosting provider, are we? You should speak to your blog hosting provider about that.

Could it be that the spammers are using search engine hits to find addresses to spam.

It could be one of the ways they use.

If their bots are hitting our site repetitively, could this slow or deny others from loading our sites?

No, the system is powerful enough that there will not be any impact on your site's performance.