Not on my dime!
Ouch! When I came home from work this evening and checked my e-mail, I got a rather nasty surprise: More than 40 “spambacks” from online poker games and porn sites.
ExpressionEngine, the blogging software I use to run this site, has always been very good about keeping comment spam under control. In fact, I’ve had only a small handful of such comments in the year since I started using EE—and no trackback spam at all, until just now. (Thank heavens for Tabbed Browsing! Deleting all of those junk trackbacks would have been a real chore in Internet Explorer, but thanks to Firefox it was just a minor inconvenience.)
As the blogosphere grows, however, the incentive for the profoundly disreputable to promote their enterprises on someone else’s dime grows right along with it.
Not on my dime, thanks.
If there is something good to come of this, I suppose it is that I looked at the preference settings for my weblog for the first time in a while. I’m glad I did, because I found out that countermeasures for precisely this kind of problem were already available.
As of now, this site will only accept one trackback per hour and the trackback URLs will be randomized to minimize this sort of automated attack. I doubt these changes will inconvenience any legitimate trackbacks, but it should keep the bad guys out.
Oh, by the way, if you happen to run an online casino or smut factory, and you’ve discovered a great way to advertise your site using trackbacks, my advice about things to do other than committing suicide does not apply to you.
Advertise on your own damn dime!
