This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: A new spamming trend Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I'm seeing an uptick in two spam trends on sites I'm either interested in (the UIUC wiki) or sites I manage (this blog). Over on the wiki, I'm starting to see the spam become more clever - if you look at the home page's history, you'll note that the last "defacing" left the page visibly ok - but changed a bunch of the underlying links. I saw an inocuous looking addition here as well (look at the page history). This is a real pain in the neck to notice, because the pages are fine by cursory examination. Like a military arms race, each advance by one side (the spam filtering that uiuc added recently) gets immediately countered with a new tactic.

I've put almost a complete stop to comment spam on my blog; there have only been a handful of successful attempts over the last few months. Referer spam, on the other hand, is an ongoing battle. I'm adding to my keyword blacklist just about daily now; I downloaded the full list of supposed referers this morning, and it was astounding how many attempts there are. The new tactic there - seemingly inocuous urls that lead to bozo sites. The battle never ends.