Spammers aren't like you or I, meaning they ain't real people sitting at a computer looking at webs and deciding to comment or do up a trackback. They're an abomination that depends on scripts that assume part of the path for comment-spam or trackback-spam includes 'htsrv'. As soon as you change that folder name (and therefore path) to something like 'wopbopaloobopawopbamboom' you, for all practical purposes, shut them out in the cold - unable to forage for food, unable to shelter themselves from the elements, and more importantly, unable to collect a paycheck for disgracing your web with their diabolic and unapealling linkage. Therefore the benefit you receive is that two flavors of spam-bots can't find you anymore.

Whoo: zat bout covr it?

pretty much. :)

Its not all that difficult for them to get around the change -- but its a very nice roadblock in the interim. And of course, not all spam comes from scripts (or bots), but certainly most of it does.

This: ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=htsrv&btnG=Search ) sort of thing is what has always troubled me, and it became evident that "it" was a problem a few months back whenn Google was unwittingly helping to propogate the Santy worm on phpBB installs.

"It", of course, being the ease with which sites running certain web apps are so easily found on the net.

Which reminds me, my renamed comment page is showing up in Google; it's time for a change.

Thanks for the breakdown. Aparently its working, I haven't gotten any trackbacks at all since I implemented it. I normally don't get valid trackbacks, so maybe I should just disable them altogether, but that would be giving in to the problem.

I've also restricted the IPs that were repeatedly hitting me, so I'm not sure which method is most effective, but at least the problem has stopped for now.

On a related sidenote, I'm glad that the b2e community has come together to work on this. These forums have been really helpful in dealing with this.

Thanks,
Chris

lenwood wrote:

... I've also restricted the IPs that were repeatedly hitting me, so I'm not sure which method is most effective, but at least the problem has stopped for now ...

About a week ago something at my host changed and (coincidentally?) I started getting "direct" hits from certain IPs every second. Sometimes 2 hits in the same second. Never any sort of user_agent info, so I just ban them via my host IP banning utility. I went from no banned IPs to about 12 now.

Yeah, I had a similar thing. After reading the forums I didn't think I would use this method. But after looking through who was hitting me with trackback spam, I had several hundred trackbacks (I think the number was somewhere around 500) from about 20 different IPs, over a span of about 3 weeks. I banned those IPs and the problem stopped.

Someone pointed out that this is a reactive solution, which is true. I'm sure they'll find new IPs to hit me with, but at least it buys me some time to get other methods of protection in place for when they start hitting me again. For a while I was spending 30 mins each day cleaning trackback spam off my site.