IBBoard

Although closing comments on all old posts has cut down on a lot of the spam, the odd bit is still getting through. Our neighbourhood repeat-IP spammer (instead of the usual spam-bot net spammers who come from a range of IPs with related spams) has tried again, and the usual range of trackback spam has continued.

I also changed the feedback emails that it sends me when someone's trackback gets stopped, and I've noticed something rather obvious to block a good proportion of the trackbacks dead - HTML character encoded vowels. OK, so people may need to use character encoding for some characters in their blog titles, that's not a problem, but only vowels? Not likely, unless it's a spammer hiding his "credit card" title from direct detection by disguising the vowels. The anti-spam system had already been converting them back to their real characters anyway, but now it stops trackbacks dead in their tracks if the encode vowels and only vowels.

Now to wait for the next set of trackbacks and see how it goes...