Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Spam filter update

I've added an additional, home-grown spam filter to the website. This one runs before the AKismet filter and acts on the trackback user agent string.

Since I installed AKismet I've been receiving literally thousands of emails per day from my website notifying me of trapped spam pings. The email doesn't come from AKismet, but from the handler I added around AKismet.

I get the email because every now and then, AKismet falsely identifies a valid trackback ping as spam. When that happens, I try to "rescue" the ping by reporting it as a valid ping to AKismet and adding it into my database.

The trouble with that is that the spammers are very active, and false positives are very infrequent. I see maybe four or five false positives a week out of literally tens of thousands of real spam pings. I'm really tired of reading the junk that spammers try to post here.

The user agent filter is based upon a pattern I've noticed. There appear to be two (maybe more) user agents that are exclusively used by spammers. I've never received a legitimate trackback from anyone using them. The new filter will reject any trackbacks sent with one of the following user agents: "Trackback/1.02", and "USERAGENT". I will not be receiving rescue mail for these trackbacks.

Another common problem with spam trackbacks is the failure to provide any user agent string at all. Those trackback pings will also be rejected without an opportunity for me to rescue them.

Hopefully this will reduce the level of frustration I experience trying to make sure that people that have a legitimate reason to post a trackback get their trackbacks posted. And maybe, I'll have to read about Viagra, pornography, used car dealerships, and painkillers a bit less often.