The program, not karma for spammers.
I’ve been getting slammed with trackback spam the last two days, and only one has managed to make it through the SK2 filters. It was held in moderation for me to delete.
Before Jay put in SK2 for me, there was an incident where I had 80-some odd trackbacks from spammers that had to be manually marked as spam, as well as those 80-some odd emails wasting space telling me that a spammer had found my trackbacks. I’ve been hit with over 500 trackback spams since yesterday, and let’s see, another 7 in the last minute or so have popped up. I’m setting SK2 to delete spam over a minute old, so if your post accidentally disappears out of moderation, I apologize ahead of time. I simply don’t want my resources clogged up with hundreds of spams awaiting deletion, and sometimes real comments show as false positives.
Try not to mention gambling, insurance, or variations on viagra, and you’ll do fine.
I had to reset mine this morning, somehow they managed to convince SK2 that they’d had over 1000 approved comments on my site and it put the granularity check out of whack.
So I disabled that, having a comment or trackback approved on my site now doesn’t improve your chances of being approved again.
I’m curious as to how they did it though.
All of them showed up as new on my site. I moderate all new or suspect comments and trackbacks. But it was driving me crazy that the spam filter wasn’t catching the ph-word. Either it’s finally caught on, or the spambot has stopped attacking my site. I think it’s up to about 700 trackback spams by now.
Good thing I remembered to turn off the “send email if comment is in moderation” option; the ph-word was showing up in the moderated comments queue.
I put it in the blacklist. I also raised the strength of the time spent onsite before posting and the trackback referrer check to “supastrong.”
There’s a hole in my script that closes older post comments. I have to add the trackback line to it, but can’t ’til I’m home.
I had the exact same word, but the karma of the poster was over 900 and when I checked where it came from, the filter showed it was already on a blacklist, but that it had lots of positive karma because there were already 1000 comments from that url that had been approved. Since that would have been over 25% of my comments I think I would have noticed.
Anyway, I disabled the snowball filter and the problem was solved.
When you get a bunch like that, it’s worth checking the karma to find out how it got through, it makes correcting the problem a lot easier.