Trackback spam not ID'd by the procedure

[gristgal]

John,

I see that there's been a new wave of trackback spam. My sympathies and thanks to all of you who are working extra hours to clean and protect our sites.

I noticed that trackbacks marked as spam were not all of the new trackbacks I had. Remembering my unhappy first encounter with spam trackbacks, I looked at one of them, and discovered it was one that should have been caught.

I had deleted another one such along with the ones that were marked, as I'd seen it when I was checking a sample of the marked ones before killing them all. Just in time, I decided to document it, so I took a screen print of it before deleting. I am holding it to forward to you, if you wish. It's almost certainly porn, and the tags on it are bilingual.

I'd suggest to other bloggers that they check whether they've also got such stuff on their blogs. How did I spot it? The Blogname column was blank.

Good luck to us all as this new exploit by the spammers is being figured out!
This is a spacing kludge, a spacing kludge, a spacing kludge,gristgal

[john]

Of course our filter will not catch all spam trackbacks. Our apologies if our communications were unclear and you had thought that would be the case. To be clear, it is not now and will never be the case. We will never be able to identify all spam trackbacks as such.

When you see trackbacks in your control panel that are spam, you should select them and click the Delete and Block button. We use this data in the aggregate (the information about which trackbacks and being marked this way) to change our filtering.

Hope this clarifies.

[gristgal]

I'm not sure. Are you telling me that you have no interest in a spam trackback that wasn't marked? If so, then I guess it's clear.

And if that's correct, you're telling us that we need to watch the trackbacks that have already been posted, to be sure someone hasn't snuck some spam past your filters. Still correct?

Thx,
gristgal