Hyperactive akismet

quasi (mads) just pinged me on IRC. He’d made a comment on my latest blog entry, but it hadn’t appeared. And another on May 1^st, which had also gone nowhere. Today’s ping was because his comment was in fact a suggestion, in response to my question.

Turns out akismet seems to have a grudge against him, and thought both his comments were spam. Since they’re both less than a week old (or whatever it is), I was able to recover them through the admin panel.

Akismet is a bit of a lifesaver, in that it eats up the vast majority of spam attacking the blog. But this is not the first time it’s given false positives. So, anyone whose comment doesn’t show up, that’s probably what happened to it. Ping me, and I’ll look for it. If you don’t ping me, I’ll never know you tried to comment.

Bizarre

Occasionally I follow a wordpress tag.  On my own blog, to find an old article.  Or on wordpress as a whole.  The latter shows a “featured blog”, which sometimes (but not always) seems relevant to the tag.  There’s quite often lunatic-fringe political ranting, that has led me to wonder if someone at WordPress regards the entire Bush team as wishy-washy liberals.

Recently I’ve seen something altogether more bizarre.  A “featured blog” that seems to be no more than computer-generated random text.  Here’s a snapshot from just now, for the “apache” tag.  A “featured blog” that’s gibberish, followed by the most recent real blog entries to use the keyword.  These entries sometimes include spam too, though the current entries are legit.

A new rain of spam

Yesterdays and todays news is that the ‘merkins have arrested one of their top spammers in Seattle. I don’t know how much difference this’ll make, but my understanding is that it’s one or two altogether different US states that give spammers a safe haven and could really make a big difference. Along with the world at large.

Here on the blog I’ve had a recent deluge of trackback spam pointing to something called “correctserver.com”. It’s a subtle one: I first saw it when I referenced an earlier post, and saw not just the one (legitimate) trackback, but a second one appearing simultaneously. I first took that for an innocent wordpress malfunction, then realised that the trackback from “[my post ]| Server software” was spam pointing to someone’s copy of my post. Since then I’ve had a number of them from the same spammer, and they get right through Akismet.

Today I just realised it’s more subtle than that. A week and a half ago, Danny Angus referenced my blog in an entry on his own. The first I saw of that was the trackback; then I saw it on Planet Apache. OK, fine, a legitimate trackback, right? Nope, it was only just this morning it showed up in my feed as [Danny's entry]|Server software that I realised it didn’t link to Danny’s post, but to the spammer’s copy of it at correctserver.com.

A subtle and devious technique. WordPress admin and Akismet: I hope you’re listening!

wordpress.com is pwned!

… is the only explanation I can see.

My last post “is it blog spam” appeared as “private” when I first hit the “publish” button. Before I’d even made it public, two comments had appeared. They were trackbacks that were definitely and unambiguously spam.

That must surely have come from within!