There have been a raft of Blam (blog spam) posts recently. To date, all the Blam I have seen has been in comment posts. There are lots of different approaches to this, none of them perfect, but they include efforts at IP blacklists, a MovableType blacklist plugin, and a feature in MovableType 3.0 that allows the blog manager to “accept or deny” comments. Simply turning comments off is another solution, but this seems to defeat the purpose of blogs.
I’ve had several people tell me that RSS couldn’t be used to send spam due to the unique reader / RSS feed relationship. I’ve consistently stated that this is wrong – the spammers (blammers) will find a way.
Today they did. I want to commemorate the first instance of true BLAM (not comment BLAM) that I’ve received. Apparently Blogger.com‘s email posting feature was hijacked this morning. I received a dozen typical spams in my RSS feed from The River (via Feedburner, into my Outlook inbox via Newsgator). So – three potential points of failure where the BLAM could have been trapped.
The BLAM was what you’d expect – see the example below.
Did you know That the normal cost for Super Vkiagra is $20, per dose? We are running a hot special!! T0DAY Its only an amazing $3.00 Shipped world wide! DISC0UNT 0RDER: https://jkn.drbucho.biz/sv/index.php?pid=eph4748
The apology from The River was nice, but only foreshadowing of worse to come.
Somehow Blogger’s e-mail posting feature on my blog was commandeered by spammers this morning, resulting in a frightening amount of pollution. I feel so… violated.
I’ve deleted the “chopper slut” deluge, but let me apologize profusely to anyone who had to deal with the excessive postings in RSS feeds. Aargh.